It is no secret that your friendly neighborhood admin LOVES statistics. Did you know that you can extract all sorts of data from your (or someone else’s) Outlook PST?
And today, one of my favorite free software companies (NirSoft) has a little app weighing in at a measly 74KB.
StatView indexes your messages, both sent and received. Then, it gives you a nifty bit of data.
This is what StatView looks like after you fire it up. It seems to work with Outlook whether it is opened or closed but if you have multiple profiles for email on your system ““ log into one of them first.
I have a huge PST that is about 1.8GB, so let’s see how long this takes to run through my file. From what I’ve read, it should take between a few seconds to a few minutes. After about 45 seconds, it has gone through about 1200 items. I am assuming that by items, it means people I have corresponded with via email. And at close to 3 minutes, it is done. This is what I see:
In the above screenshot, I have sorted by total incoming messages. The column next to it is total outgoing messages. I have whited out the email addresses to prevent death threats (from them to me not from you to them). So, at a glance we can see who I am communicating with regularly.
There are a bunch more columns, including total message size, to and from this contact, when the first contact and last message was sent. So right off the bat, that is some good information that you can not find directly in Outlook.
Maybe you wouldn’t find this as useful as I do, but how about running it on an employee’s machine? Now, you have an overview of who THEY are communicating with on your dime! And you can print out a report to give to Human Resources if necessary.
You see the options to report on selected items or all items.
StatView works only on Windows 2000/XP and later; and with any version of Outlook.
Do you have some other way of pulling statistics out of Outlook? Or how about another email application? We would love to hear about it in the comments!
Tagged: email • microsoft outlook • statistics
