Almost every corporate email account uses Outlook and Exchange server to process the user’s email, and there is a lot of data stored in these PST files. My own working PST file for Outlook is close to 2GB, so I wrote a post on how to optimize your PST file to make Outlook run faster.
Before the full switch to Gmail, my personal email file was over 10GB! This is great! Basically, these were emails for 8 years. Even though Outlook allows you to organize your email into folders and so on, it doesn’t actually have statistics on your email usage.
To whom did you write the most letters? Who did you receive the most emails from? Who sent you the most email data? What was the first and last message you received from a particular person?
This is where you need third-party programs to analyze your PST file and provide all sorts of useful statistics. I have previously written about how to search in emails by size, date, sender, etc., but that’s a lot of work.
Search is really useful for finding emails, attachments, etc. from specific people. If you want basic email statistics, try a program called OutlookStatView from Nirsoft.
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OutlookStatView – stats for Outlook
OutlookStatView is a simple program that scans your Outlook PST file and gives you basic statistics about the people you chat with.
Basically, for every person you’ve ever written or emailed you to, you get the following set of information:
- The number of outgoing emails you’ve sent to that person, broken down by TO / CC / BCC
- The number of inbound emails the person has sent you.
- The total size of all emails sent to you by this person.
- Email client used from person
- The range of time that you have sent / received emails from a person.
The great thing about the program is that you don’t need to install OutlookStatView in Outlook as an add-in. It is a standalone program that automatically scans your PST file whether Outlook is open or not.
If you have multiple Outlook profiles, be sure to sign in to the one you want to scan before launching OutlookStatView You can also export the whole thing as an HTML report for later viewing.
It doesn’t take long to scan a very large mailbox, about 2 minutes for a 1.5 GB file. Not bad! In general, this is rather simplistic, but useful if you want to know who you most often communicate with via email.
If you’re interested in even more analytic data about your email, there are several additional paid add-ons that can generate charts and provide a lot more metrics.
Microsoft We Analytics
Outlook Brief
I haven’t used any of them, but after browsing their websites, they all seem to be good options. Hopefully this gives you enough statistics about your email! Enjoy!
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