Outlook does not archive messages based on their received date

A colleague of mine was complaining that his Outlook 2010 (auto)archive option does not work. He showed me that he wanted to archive all emails received before for example 01/11/2011 (dd/mm/yyyy). And, really all those emails that met the criteria, had received date older than 01/11/2011, were still sitting in his mailbox. But, that's the way how outlook works by default :)
Outlook determines how old are the messages by using one of the following, whichever is later:

• Sent date and time
• Received date and time
• Modified date and time

Hmmm, modified date and time ... After adding the modified column on his view, all those messages that had met the criteria by received date, had modified date 04/08/2012 (dd/mm/yyyy), and that's why they were still sitting in mailbox. This kind of Outlook behavior can be changed. There is a registry key (dword) ArchiveIgnoreLastModifiedTime = 1 . This key should be created for:

• Outlook 2010 in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Preferences
• Outlook 2013 in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Outlook\Preferences

Outlook 2010 requires hotfix 2516474, for changing the default archiving behavior.

More about default Outlook archiving behavior and how to change it on following Microsoft KBs: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/295657 and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2553550 .