Cleanup your E-mail
Our goal for College Outlook with Exchange accounts is 1 GB (or 1,000 megabytes (MB)) of storage space per user with a reasonable amount of flexibility. This is roughly equivalent to 12,000 e-mail messages (including attachments and calendar data) in total for all of your folders. If your storage space goes beyond 1GB then you will receive a reminder that you should take action to free up disk space.
Large folder sizes directly affect you, the user. The more space your mailboxes take up, the slower your e-mail access will be since there's so much information for the system to transfer from the server to your computer.
Reduce the Size of your E-mail Disk Space
There are several steps you can take to manage your storage space.
- Periodically empty the Deleted Items folder. This is a good end-of-the-week task.
- Delete all items older than a certain date.
- Examples: two-year old e-mail or outdated meeting notices.
- You can sort your mailboxes by date received or do an Advanced Find to locate those messages older than a certain date.
- Once deleted, they should also be deleted from the Deleted Items folder.
- Move seasonal or less used folders to local storage instead of on the server. See steps on How To Move Seasonal or Less Used Outlook Folders.
- Delete attachments from Sent Mail.
- Outlook/Exchange saves a copy of all attachments that you send or receive onto the Exchange server.
- It's logical that if you send someone an attachment, that the file is already stored on your computer, therefore another copy on the Exchange server may not be necessary.
- You can sort a folder by attachments (the little paper clip).
- Bring up the e-mail message, highlight the attachment and delete it.
- Then exit and save the message.
- File incoming attachments into the proper folder within My Documents.
- Right-click on the attachments icon.
- You can then select "Save As" to save the attachment.
- Next you can delete the attachment from the server by right-clicking the attachment icon and selecting "Remove".
- This keeps the e-mail message without the attachment taking up space on the server.
- Periodically delete items from the Sent Items folder. This is a good end-of-the-month task.
Note: To see a video of this How To, right-click on this link and choose Save Target As. Save to your Desktop. Once the file is downloaded, double-click to open the file. This video was recorded in Outlook 2003. All the concepts still apply.