Creating an Empty Copy of an Outlook Personal Folder Hierarchy

Have you ever needed to duplicate a personal folder hierarchy in Outlook without duplicating the messages contained in the original folder hierarchy? For example, you may want to create a 2008 folder and copy all of the subfolders from your 2007 folder into the 2008 folder. This is very straightforward and can be done by right clicking on the folder, selecting copy “folder_name”, and following the wizard. Done and done. But what about all of those mail items that you just duplicated in your mailbox?

Here is one way to duplicate the folder hierarchy without duplicating all of the mail items in Outlook 2003.

1. Click File | Import and Export

2. Select Export to a File and click Next

3. Select Personal Folder File (.pst) and click Next

4. Select the parent folder of the folder hierarchy that you would like to duplicate

5. Mark the Include Subfolders checkbox

6. Click on the button labeled Filters

This is where you will have to use a little creativity. The idea is to set a filter that will exclude all of the mail items in the folder hierarchy. In this example, I will assume that there is a max mail size of 10 MB set for the Exchange Org and will set the filter to only export mail items larger than 10 MB, which should give use empty folders. You will need to play with the filters and see what works best for you.

7. Click on the More Choices tabbed page

8. At the very bottom of the page, change the Size (kilobytes) drop down box to greater than

9. Enter 10240 (10 MB as kilobytes) into the size field and click OK

10. Click Next

11. Select a location to save the exported file and click Next

12. Click OK

If your filter was successful, a .pst file containing only the folder hierarchy will be exported to the location that you selected in step 11. Now we need to import the folder hierarchy back into the mailbox.

13. Create a new parent folder for the folder hierarchy that you are going to import. In our example, we are exporting our 2007 folder hierarchy and importing it to create a 2008 folder hierarchy, so our parent folder will be named 2008.

14. In your mailbox click to select the newly created 2008 folder. When Outlook imports the folder hierarchy, we will choose an option to import into the currently selected folder.

15. Click File | Import and Export

16. Select Import from another program or file and click Next

17. Select Personal Folder File (.pst) and click Next

18. Navigate to the file that you exported in step 11 and click Next

19. Select the folder that you would like to import

20. Make sure that the Include Subfolders checkbox is marked

21. Select Import items into the current folder and click Finish

You now have an exact duplicate of an Outlook personal folder hierarchy with out duplicating all of the mail items stored in the original folder.