NHSmail online archiving

Learn how you can store and manage old emails to free up space and improve performance…

Following the NHSmail Refresh you will experience the benefits of online archiving. This will help you manage your mailbox capacity. We have also been made aware a number of mailboxes have been temporarily increased to 50GB to allow for emails to be moved to the online storage without affecting your ability to send and receive emails.

What is online archiving?

Online Archiving is a solution that enables you to store and manage older or legacy emails outside of your NHSmail mailbox – freeing up space and improving Outlook performance.

You will be able to manage your own individual archiving setup to best suit your needs. Initially 100GB of online archiving storage space will be provided, alongside your standard 4GB mailbox.

Depending on the amount of emails you send and receive this should provide 10-20 years of storage capacity.

Once your account has been upgraded, you will see an additional mailbox in the left-hand side panel of Outlook (Outlook desktop application or the NHSmail Web Portal). This will follow a similar naming convention to your primary account with the prefix ‘Online Archive’ used in the Outlook desktop client and ‘In-Place Archive’ used in the NHSmail Web Portal, followed by your nhs.net account email address. This mailbox will hold all of your archived content.

Outlook Desktop Client:

NHSmail Web Portal:

How do I use archiving?

There are two ways you can manually archive emails and email folders:

1. The simplest way to archive is to create an easy folder structure in exactly the same way you would within Outlook, then drag and drop the selected email from your primary nhs.net mailbox into the correct folders within the Online Archive mailbox within your Outlook client (desktop or through the NHSmail portal). With the desktop client you can also move folders to or from the Online Archive mailbox. Note the Outlook Web App (OWA) does not support folder moves.
2. Import .pst files to your mailbox and migrate the items to the Online Archive mailbox. Find detailed guidance on how to import Outlook items on the Microsoft Office support website (Outlook desktop only).

We’ll be putting together a few MS Teams bite-sized training sessions, to help you get to grips with online archiving. Look out for further details in the staff newsletter and on AskHUE in the New Year.

In the meantime, if you have any questions contact Alan Hicks.