Managing your Message Store and Mailbox Space

Transcription

1 Managing your Message Store and Mailbox Space Get a message that says you re running out of space? Not a big deal chances are that it s the few things you DON T want to keep that are using up most of your space. These days it seems nobody thinks twice about sending large attachments (over 1mb) by and you often see bunches of attachments in a single message. Getting rid of unwanted attachments that you sent or received is the fastest way to clean up your space utilization and stay within size limits. Your mailbox Space actually includes your Inbox, Sent Items, Calendar, Deleted Items, and all your other folders. There is an overall Disk Space quota that applies to your entire Message Store. By default, each faculty or staff member is allotted 1gb of space, and each student receives 450mb. You will begin to receive warnings once your message store is within 50mb of your limit. If you ignore these warnings and your space reaches your limit, you will no longer be able to send or receive . To see the amount of space you are currently using, right click on the folder in the Folder List window, and choose Properties. On the General tab, there s a button labeled Folder size which will show you the aggregate size of the folder and any sub-folders that it contains. Your space allocation includes ALL items in your Message Store, including sent items, deleted items, calendars, your inbox, and any subfolders you have made to manage your mail. Your mailbox is the most inefficient file cabinet there is. There are no effective search tools to locate attachments (files) within your messages, and you typically wind up with multiple copies of the same attachments - you receive a file as an attachment, forward it to someone else (2 nd copy), then they send it back to you with a simple question (3 rd copy) or you forward to a third person, etc. when they can t easily locate the file a month later, they ask the originator to send it again and before long there are 10 copies of the same file attachment being stored in mailboxes. New versions get mixed up with old versions and nobody is sure which is which anymore. is absolutely the worst filing system known to humankind! 1

2 Everyone has become attachment-happy many s contain a message that is then repeated in an attached word document, and there are many frivolous attachments that may not be of interest to the recipient. Mailbox space is also the most expensive storage space. Mail is stored on high-performance highavailability drives that cost more than the deep storage used for file servers. As the overall storage used by the mail servers increases, mail server responsiveness decreases. The larger it is, the longer your mailbox takes to load every time you start outlook. Mail servers are backed up in their entirety every day, versus the incremental and differential backup strategies used for file servers. Obtaining Additional Mailbox Space CTS will provide additional mailbox space if there is a demonstrable need. However, your 400mb or 1gb limit is enough for you to store tens of thousands of messages if you use your mailbox efficiently. Most people just let it accumulate until they start getting warning messages, and then panic and ask for more space. They may only have 2,000 messages, but half of those have bloated attachments that ate up their space. Managing the attachments in your mailbox is relatively easy, even if you only infrequently attend to it. When you request more space, CTS will want to confirm that you are managing your attachments before granting your request, and that you are not using your mailbox as a filing cabinet. File Servers File servers both your Personal Home Directory and Departmental File shares are far easier to manage and work with than trying to find things buried in old mail messages. Both types offer far better search capabilities (including full text searches), and allow you to easily distinguish current versions of a file from older versions. Departmental File Shares have the added benefit of making the files available to other members of your workgroup so that everyone is on the same page. File servers both personal and departmental are also available through the VPN. The VPN allows you to connect to Purchase from a remote location (i.e. your home) so that you can access your work nights, weekends, or in an emergency. CTS will be happy to set you up with a Personal Home Directory or Departmental File share if you do not already have one, and with VPN access to your desktop machine and files. Identifying mail with Large Attachments Any message that has an attachment will show a paper clip icon to the left of the sender s name in the main Outlook window. Many people use attachments in signature files, Vcards, and other elements within their messages. However, many of these attachments are so small you don t really have to worry about them so just looking at all messages with attachments isn t the solution. What you have to do is look for the messages that have attachments over 40kb or so. The grey bar showing the field labels in outlook (shown below) makes it easy to sort messages by date, by user, or by size but you have to add the size field. 2

3 Managing the space within a folder You can see the size of messages by displaying the size field for each message. It is not included in the default view (by default it shows From, Subject, Received ) To add the Size column right-click on the gray field sorter toolbar and select Field Chooser from the submenu On the Field Chooser dialog box, scroll down to Size and drag it up to the field sorter toolbar in the location you want it to appear Once you are displaying the size of each message, you can click Size in the field-sorter toolbar to sort them in size order (click again to reverse the order) and eliminate the largest messages first. The size shown for each message includes the size of any attachments to the message. When you sort messages by size, Outlook groups them into the following categories for you: Enormous (over 5mb) Huge (1-5mb) Very Large (500k-1mb) Large ( k) By attacking the Enormous and Huge categories, you will quickly clear up a lot of space. 3

4 By far the most productive way to clear out space is to eliminate large attachments wherever possible. For attachments that have been sent TO you, go through your inbox and save them to your home directory on the file server (or to your departmental file share) When I do this I put the name of the saved file into the message surrounded by brackets, i.e. <<\\server\path\filename.doc>>. After you remove saved the attachment to the a file server, REMOVE the attachment from the message (right click the attachment and choose remove ), and then save the message (File/Save or Ctrl-S.) o The <<filename>> notation serves two purposes it reminds you that the message contained an attachment, and tells you where to find the attachment. Don t forget the bloated attachments YOU sent to others they count toward your space allocation as well. Go to your SENT items, add the Size Field, and get rid of the Enormous and Huge file attachments you sent out. Make the same notation in the message and delete the attachment chances are you already have it saved on your hard disk. The attachments in your Calendar, Tasks, Sent items, Deleted Items, and everything in your message store is counted toward your quota. Saving the Attachments you want to keep, and leaving a marker in the message: After identifying messages containing important attachments, you can save the attachments to your file server and leave a marker with the file name in the message. 1) Save the attachment someplace. Right click on the attachment and choose Save As then navigate to the location you want the attachment saved. In the example below, it s Banner- Recruiter documentation, so I m saving it to that project folder. Note that the filename that appears in the Save As: File Name is the same as the name of the attachment. Before you hit Save - COPY the name of the file (Ctrl+C) to your clipboard so that we can paste the name of the file into the message subject line. Save the file to the directory you choose. 4

5 2) Click to place the cursor at the end of the Subject Line this is the only message component you can modify. Paste the filename you copied in step 1 into the end of the subject line. I usually put symbols around it just to set it off from the rest of the original subject line << Filename.pdf >> 3) Remove the attachment from the message. Right-click the attachment and choose Remove. 4) Save the modified message (attachment removed, marker added.) After you have inserted the marker with the name of the attachment that was included in the message and removed the attachment, save the message back to your mailbox by pressing Ctrl+S If you don t need to save the attachment, you can just remove the attachment and save the modified message (steps 3 and 4 shown above). 5