Archive based on Received instead of Modified date
I’m using the AutoArchive function in Outlook to clean up the older items in my mailbox.
However, I noticed that some old emails are still in my mailbox even though their received date is from before the archive date. Apparently, the archive feature looks at the Modified date of a message rather than the Received date.
How can I archive based on the Received date instead of the Modified date?
In various scenarios, it indeed makes more sense to archive based on the Received date rather than the Modified date.
By making a Registry change, you can change this behavior and force Outlook to look at the Received date instead.
However, this also changes the behavior of how other Outlook items such as meeting, appointments and tasks are archived.
ArchiveIgnoreLastModifiedTime Registry key
To have Outlook look at the Received date instead of the Modified date for archiving emails, add the following key to the Registry;
Key for Outlook 2010: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Preferences
Key for Outlook 2013: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Outlook\Preferences
Key for Outlook 2016, 2019, and Microsoft 365: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Preferences
Value name: ArchiveIgnoreLastModifiedTime
Value type: REG_DWORD
Value: 1
New behavior
E-mail messages will now be archived based on their Received date, Calendar items based on their scheduled date and Task items based on their Completed date.
Extra tip: Recurring items are archived based on their created date. As Recurring items are just single Calendar items containing all occurrences, when they get archived all future occurrences will be removed from your Calendar as well. To prevent this, exclude a recurring item from being archived by selecting it and then pressing ALT+ENTER. You can then set the option: Do not AutoArchive this item.
For more information about the new and old behavior for archiving also see; How to change the criteria that Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 use to archive different item types.
When Archiving is in progress, it is displayed in the Status Bar.
Administrators: Deploy via Group Policies
The same setting is also controlled via the following Group Policy;
User Configuration-> Administrative Templates-> Microsoft Outlook <version>-> Outlook Options-> Other-> AutoArchive-> Change the criteria that Outlook uses to archive different item types
