Microsoft’s new Outlook app — labeled “Outlook (new)” as opposed to “Outlook (classic)” — normally saves your emails online, so you cannot access them without an internet connection. However, it’s now possible to store messages locally on your computer.
To do this, open Outlook and click on the gear icon in the title bar at the top to call up the Settings.
Select General on the left-hand side and click on Offline in the column to the right. Make sure that the Activate offline emails, calendars and people switch is set to On.
In the menu under Folders to be saved, you can then specify which mail folders should be saved locally. The default setting is Default and favorites. Default includes the folders Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Archive, Deleted, and Snooze.
This setting covers all important folders. Below this, you will find the option Days of emails to be saved. Here you can specify how far back the local archive should go. The default setting is 30 days. However, you can use the menu to copy messages up to 180 days old to the local SSD/hard drive. The higher you select this value, the more storage space the mail archive requires.
Please note: The offline feature only works if you had Outlook open with an existing internet connection and then go offline, for example because the WLAN is no longer available. However, if you try to start Outlook without an internet connection, you will only receive a message about a connection error.
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This article originally appeared on our sister publication PC-WELT and was translated and localized from German.
Author: Roland Freist, Contributor, PCWorld
Roland Freist is a freelance IT journalist covering topics related to Windows, applications, networks, security and the Internet.