E mail Housekeeping for Effective Mailbox Management

Transcription

1 E mail Housekeeping for Effective Mailbox Management Students and staff of the University who are approaching the allocated quota will receive a message from the Exchange Server System Administrator advising them that their mailbox is too large. This message often causes concern and often prompts requests for quota increases. All users receive an unrestricted quota of 500 MB. As storage capacity on our mail servers is limited, we must, therefore, work sensibly within the limits of the available storage capacity. Effective mailbox management and control is therefore as essential for as it is for our paper based communications. Adopting the following basic housekeeping rules and practices as part of an overall effective mailbox management strategy will ensure you keep within your quota. WARNING! The System Administrator s bite is much worse than his warning bark! Failing to act following receipt of the System Administrator s quota warning is not advised, you must pay immediate attention. You will receive an warning when your mailbox is at 450MB and you will continue receiving quota warnings until you take action to reduce your mailbox size. If you take no action and your mailbox size reaches 500MB you will be prevented from sending messages. You will never be stopped from receiving s. This paper shows you what to do and how to avoid this situation ever happening. Introductory All members of the University s systems have 500MB of data storage on the servers. The System Administrator issues a warning when your mailbox is at 450MB. If the mailbox size reaches 500MB you are prevented from sending any . You will never be stopped from receiving s Reducing mailbox size to below the quota stops warnings and re enables your ability to send mails. Four e mail housekeeping do s and don ts Effective housekeeping essentially boils down to observing four common sense mailbox management practices. 1. Regularly clean out your Inbox and its subfolders 2. Don't keep what you don't need in your Sent Items Folder 3. Ensure that items you have deleted are actually deleted 4. Adopt an attachment management strategy [ use links to a common storage area]

2 1. Regularly clean out your Inbox and its subfolders Unless you regularly clear out your Inbox, the messages in it will erode your valuable quota. Given our ever growing dependence on , an unmanaged Inbox can end up with hundreds (even thousands) of items over the course of a year. It is essential to take some time to go through old messages, removing those you don't need to retain. And you re thinking; I just don t have the time to go through my mail and clean it up. Correct. We know. None of us do. However, your is an essential work tool so you have to make time for its care. Like any housekeeping task,keeping your inbox tidy (the fewer messages in here, the better) is an ongoing and apparently thankless chore. Regular effort perhaps assigning a weekly slot for it keeps things under control and soon becomes a practice. You are the best judge on what you should remove. However, be Draconian! Do your retained messages have any practical or contemporary relevance? Messages dating back a year or more generally indicate you should get clearing. Users often create sophisticated folder structures allowing messages to be moved to folders appropriate to their subject matter. If you do this then you already possess a little of the housekeeping know how. Do remember, however, just because you move messages from your Inbox to these subfolders, this does not mean that you have cleared space on the mail server. Your quota includes everything you see under your folder list including new folders you create. It is not just the Inbox. Your folder structure simply re organises your on the server more effectively. What is said about the Inbox applies equally to messages filed within your personalised folder structure. Summary Inbox and subfolder management Clear out your Inbox regularly otherwise it will grow very large very quickly. You can save messages to a personal storage offline archive file if you do not wish to delete them. is an essential work tool. You need to make time to manage it effectively. You can create subfolders to structure the you retain on the server. filed to these subfolders is still on the server and occupies part of your quota. 2. Don't keep what you don't need in your Sent Items Folder Whenever you send an , Outlook by default saves a copy of it to your Sent Items folder. Whilst this is useful to refer back to items you have personally issued, the Sent Items folder if unchecked will keep a copy of every item you have sent within your space. Do you really need to have a copy of absolutely everything you ve ever sent? You can disable this feature within Outlook under Tools.. Options.. Options.. and then uncheck "Save copies of messages in Sent items Folder". If you don't want to disable this feature then regularly access the Sent Items folder and delete messages you don't need to retain otherwise just like an unmanaged Inbox, the number of sent s will soon creep up and up. All that is said about the Inbox applies equally to the Sent Items folder.

3 Even with the save Sent Items feature turned off you can still ensure that you retain a copy of important items you send if you bcc yourself into the message. You will thereby receive a copy of it in your own Inbox from where you can manually move it to the Sent Items folder. It s really just a question of learning to use this practice. Of course you may not feel comfortable adopting that method and feel better protected by the Sent Items default functionality. That s fine. However, it s then your obligation to pay attention to how much you do retain in that folder. Summary Managing the Sent Items folder Outlook s default behaviour is to save a copy of every you send in your sent Items folder. Ask yourself do you really need to save a copy of each you send? You can change that behaviour from within Outlook s settings. Alternatively you could bcc yourself into s of importance and manually file them. in your Sent Items is stored on the server and erodes your file quota. Prevent Outlook saving a copy of sent messages to the Sent Items folder Tools.. Options.. Options.. uncheck "Save copies of messages in Sent items Folder" 3. Ensure that the items you have deleted are actually deleted It is a common mistake to delete s but never to actually empty the Deleted Items folder. Check that the Deleted Items folder actually empties whenever you close Outlook. From Tools.. Options.. Other.. ensure that the checkbox "Empty the Deleted Items folder upon exiting" is checked. If you don t actually empty the Deleted Items folder then no matter how much you delete you will never make any dent into the amount of space your occupies. Deleted Items is just another folder occupying space on your mail quota. If it is not actually emptied then all you achieve by deleting items is that you move them to that folder. A word of warning. The deleted items bin is your waste paper basket or dustbin. It s not advisable to use this folder as an additional message filing folder. Shockingly this has been done. If, however, you do, the odds are that a helpful colleague might empty it for you or a network policy might be implemented to force this folder to empty upon Outlook existing. Summary Managing the Deleted Items folder Make sure your deleted items folder is actually emptied An unemptied deleted items folder erodes your quota Set Outlook to empty the Deleted Items folder when you exit the program Tools.. Options.. Other.. check the box "Empty the Deleted Items folder upon exiting" 4. Adopt an attachment management strategy The University code of practice says it all: Use attachments with care, and only if the material cannot be included in the body of the message. Pure text should always be sent within the message. Large images should only be sent if they are essential. [See: An alternative to using attachments later in this document] generally is a very storage efficient communication data format: it is a simple text file. Even lengthy s like those your line manager regularly sends telling you how great and how essential you are to the running of the department usually amount to little more than a few

4 kilobytes (KB) in size. Such s are good: small and quota friendly. If the average is, say, approximately 10KB in size it would take roughly 10,000 s of that size to exceed your quota. That s a lot. However, it s what arrives alongside and attached to the that really does the damage and erodes your mail quota. Attachments can be anything: from Office documents to multimedia files. Even if these are sent to you in a compressed format and notwithstanding that individually they might not be that large eventually, cumulatively, if unmanaged they will take up the greater part of your quota. How do I determine which s have attachments? Whenever your has a paperclip icon attached to it that indicates there is an attachment accompanying it. How to determine what is taking up most space. In Outlook 2007 you can use Search Folders this is located at the bottom of your mailbox, within the Search Folders you can see Large Mail and this will show the mail according to size

5 Re order the view of your . You can use the headings at the top of the items view of your various mailbox folders to re order your . For example, by clicking the From heading will order your messages in order of sender and so on. To the right there should be a heading Size (you might need to resize the headings for it to be in view). By clicking on this in each of your folders, you will order your messages by size. You will find that some messages are very large (usually ones with attachments) and these are the ones that need attention. To determine which s have attachments and their size To deal with existing attachments, you can alter the view of any folder to list those s with attachments. You do this simply by clicking on the Sort by: Attachment column header in your folder window that s the one with the tiny paperclip picture. You can then click on the size column header to re arrange the view from largest to smallest or vice versa. Remove attachments from your and save them elsewhere If you regularly receive attachments by remember that these sit on the mail server within your quota taking up valuable space. To keep the System Administrator happy, attachments especially very large ones are probably best removed from the and saved somewhere else preferably in your home directory: your H:\ Drive. How to remove the Attachment To save the attachment elsewhere open the to which it is attached. Using the Office button, select Save As and then Save Attachments.. Navigate to your home folder via the Save Attachments windows that appears. Save Attachments only copies the attachment to your chosen location the original is still sitting stubbornly attached to that message. Go back to that message highlight the attachment, right click and then select remove. It s gone. Congratulations you ve just liberated some space within your quota. An alternative to using attachments It is not compulsory to remove attachments from your . However, if the attachment is something that you have to work on or something you might refer to time and time again, it s probably best removed from the original and saved somewhere else. Occasionally, in an evolving document that s shared and amended back and forth between parties, you might argue; well I d like to keep a note of changes to the document at such and such a date. A possible suggestion depending on the type of document being amended you could turn on change tracking features. There is more sophistication in such mechanisms for evolving documentation. Your IT Trainer can explain more. If you are passing an attachment between a number of users within your own area or the recipients all have access to a common network share consider putting the attachment on that share and direct your recipients to it using a link. For instance if I am a member of Registry and am referring to a document called Report.doc I can create a folder on the S:\ Drive shared Registry area. For instance I create a folder called ReportDocument. All I need to do to easily guide my recipients to

6 this document is include the network path to it within the body of my in the following format: e.g. S:\ReportDocument\Report.doc Avoid using spaces in the folder and file names or use underscores such as Report_Document to preserve the link so that your recipients can click on it to immediately open the document. Summary Managing Attachment Attachments are the main quota sapping culprits You can re order your to view which have attachments and their overall size. You can use Search Folders to find Large Messages You can remove attachments from the original and save them elsewhere. Locate a document on a shared network area and you will not need to include it as an attachment. How to remove an attachment From File.. select Save Attachments.. Navigate to your home folder via the Save Attachments window that appears. Remember to delete the original in your .

7 Reviewed by Carlos Moreira