Outlook - Find e-mails by date received or sent

Every January I tidy up my Outlook inbox. I move the e-mails from the previous year into a folder (it makes it easier to archive later). To do this I need to select a range of e-mails by date. In this article I'll explain how use Outlook's advanced find to do this. I'm using Outlook 2013 but other versions should be similar.


Scenario 1
It is January 2018. I would like to find all e-mails received and sent during 2017. I currently have no e-mails in my inbox from years prior to 2017.

1. With the Outlook inbox (Mail) on the screen press Ctrl-Shift-F and the Advanced Find window will appear.
2. Click Browse and select the Inbox and Sent Items
3. Click the Advanced tab
4. Under 'Define more criteria' click Field | Date/Time Fields | Received
5. Condition = on or before
6. Value = 31/12/2017
7. Click Add to List
8. Under 'Define more criteria' click Field | Date/Time Fields | Sent
9. Condition = on or before
10. Value = 31/12/2017
11. Click Add to List
12. Click Find Now

In the above screen shot you can see the list of e-mails (received and sent) for 2017 are shown. At this point I could select those (use Shift-click or Ctrl-A to select them all) and drag them to a folder in my inbox.


Scenario 2
Perhaps you'd like to be more specific and select between a date range? It's very similar to the above but use the Condition 'between' and enter the Value as <start date> and <end date>. Here's an example:

The above will show all the e-mails from 1st January 2017 to 31st December 2017. It doesn't show those from 1st January 2018.

NOTE: Excel uses the date format you have set on your computer. In my examples I'm using dd/mm/yyyy but for those of you in the US you would use mm/dd/yyyy.


Conclusion
The Advanced Find is very powerful and can save you some time. You can do it manually instead of course, it's easy enough to select e-mails by their date from your inbox directly - but it's rather slow and cumbersome, using the Advanced Find it's much faster and more accurate. I hope this has been helpful, feel free to add comments in below if you have some similar tips to share.