Use Outlook for a while and it’s all too easy to let the messages pile up. Soon your inbox is a bloated mess, too large to tackle easily, and so you just try to ignore everything older than the last week or so.

NirSoft’s OutlookStatView helps out by drilling down into your accounts and producing some detailed reports. Who’s sending you the most emails? The bulkiest attachmments? How many messages are you handling each hour, day, week, month, year? It’s all just a click or two away.

Launch the program and initially it scans your default account, listing the following details for everyone who’s ever sent you an email: their display name, email address, domain, the total number of incoming and outgoing emails, the total size of incoming and outgoing emails, the average size of incoming and outgoing emails, their first and last message date, and the email client and computer address they used for those first and last messages.

The report is displayed in a table, and you can sort on any field by clicking its column header

There’s also an option to display hourly/ daily/ weekly/ monthly/ yearly summaries, which are just about email traffic in general (the total number and size of any messages you’ve received).

Any of these can be sorted by clicking a column header, a quick way to analyse the data further. You could check who’s generating the most incoming traffic, where you’ve mostly been sending emails this month, how many email addresses are contacting you from any given domain, or whatever else you need to know.

The program can produce its reports on any Outlook account, in any version of Outlook, and you’re able to save them as text or HTML reports for reference later.

As usual with NirSoft’s reporting tools, this probably isn’t something you’ll use every day. But it can be helpful occasionally, for example highlighting mailing lists which are generating the most and the bulkiest traffic (we found three we didn’t need and unsubscribed right away).

OutlookStatView’s portability means it’s also a handy forensics tool. Would you like to know how someone else is using their Outlook account? Just run the program on their system to find out. (Although if you don’t have any right to this information, beware: someone else can do precisely the same to you.)