How can I defeat my company's archive rule?

The company I work for archives all emails each month. This has significantly negatively affected me ever since they started doing this. The way that we have to search for, review and retrieve archived emails is terrible.

I will refrain from going into full complaint mode, and get to my question. Is there a way for me to defeat this monthly archive process? I thought about creating a rule to make copies of all emails from specific people that would go into a "Copy" folder. Then, and this is the part I have no idea how to accomplish, have a rule or a macro or some magical wizardry, forward all emails back to me. Obviously, this is an imperfect and incomplete idea, but it's where I'm at at the moment.

I know this might seem like not such a big problem, but for me, it is huge. There didn't used to be any email archiving, and life was good. As imperfect as my memory is in most aspects of my life, I have a strange ability to remember emails from years ago, and my inbox along with my own internal (brain) archival process was the perfect organizational system.

So, can anybody help me?

Originally Posted by 6StringJazzer

You can set up a rule to save a copy in a folder based on who sent it. Rules are a built-in feature of Outlook. If you are not familiar with it I can give more detailed instructions. You can create a new folder that is local to your hard drive and the rule can send the copy to that folder. I don't know how your company's archive process works--can you explain more?

Thanks for the suggestion. The company archives all emails after one month's time. After emails are a month old or older, we can still access them and all attachments, but we have to use a web-based (rather than Outlook) system that is very slow and cumbersome. It's just not user-friendly at all.

I am familiar with the ability to use Rules, though, I am certainly not an expert at using them them. Your idea is fine except it would not make searching for specific emails any easier. Like I said, all emails are available no matter how old, it's just that searching for them becomes a real pain in the butt.

For example, If I want to search for a specific email in Outlook, I can just type the following in the "Search Current Mailbox" field: from:"miller, james" to:"bateman" subject:"Pfizer" In reality, I don't even have to type it all out like that. It is simple, fast and easy. If I want to perform the same search in the online system, it can take more than five minutes. Five minutes isn't a lot of time, but when I could do the same search in Outlook in 5 seconds, and I might have to search for 20 other emails each day, 5 minutes is an eternity.

This is why I was hoping for a way to “make old new again”. I can make a rule that puts copies of all emails that meet my criteria in a specific folder. If I could then just find a way to make all of those emails “new” again each month, that would be perfect.