MCC Daily Tribune Archive

Suggestions To Keep Your Email Account Smaller:

If you do not maintain your email with some sort of discipline, you will eventually receive a nastygram from the server stating that you have exceeded your quota. This will prevent you from sending any email. (This is known as email jail). However, you will continue to receive mail which will make matters worse.

The fix, of course, is to delete stored emails until you get under the quota limit and can send mail again.

Here are a couple of ideas you can implement to reduce your email footprint and hopefully keep you out of email jail. If you are diligent about organizing your email and putting it in to folders, don’t be fooled into thinking your mailbox is empty. Each one of those folders resides inside of your mailbox.

When deleting your email contents to get under the quota, target these five items first:

1.       Empty the deleted mail folder. This is weird, you think, because you already deleted that mail. Really, what you have done, is to put those emails in the trash can. You have not yet taken out the trash. It is like it is still sitting in your kitchen using up your living space.

2.       Empty your sent folder. This email has already been sent. These are just copies of your sent mail and are taking up space in your limited living room.

3.       Empty your drafts folder. This can fill up if you have several messages with attachments. Delete any that you are never going to send. Ironically, you can’t send the ones you want to until you get under your quota. (remember to go back and send those when you do get under the quota)

4.       Detach and save attachments from your email and then delete the email. The attachments are saved to your hard drive (or wherever you designate) and are no longer on the mail server taking up space.

5.       Sort your mail by size instead of by date. Delete the biggest emails first. In this manner you are reducing the size of your mail folder quickly while minimizing the impact on yourself (unless the biggest emails also happen to be the most important to you).

Archive: call the help desk (292-TECH) and ask to have a technician assist you with setting up an archive. An Archive will take your mail off of the server, reducing your quota size, but still give you access to your emails. You should archive to your U:\ drive. This is a secure location that only you can access. Unlike your C:\ drive, this location is backed up.

Going forward, don’t send attachments unless you need to. Instead, send links if possible. This works particularly well if you are sending email to a group of internal recipients. Just imagine you are sending fifty of your co-workers (or students) an attachment that is a two-megabyte Word document. In reality you have just sent 100 megabytes to the mail server! (fifty recipients each receiving a two-megabyte file). It would be much better to save the document to a network location that each of the recipients has access to and then send the fifty recipients a link, or directions to the location of the file.

If you follow these suggestions, you should be able to remain free from email jail.