Effective Use of Email

Email makes communicating with fellow workmates, friends and family very easy and as a result it is also very easy to accumulate email files in your mailbox. Accumulating emails has an effect on server resources as every email you send or receive is stored on the email server. 

Go through your mailbox and personal folders once a month and delete any non-essential emails. A general rule-of-thumb is if you haven't referred to an email for two months, delete or archive it. Some steps to follow in filing your emails include:

  • Archiving emails to your personal folders area. When this area reaches a certain size, you will be asked to clean it out or have it burnt to CD for final archiving. 
  • Setting auto archiving on the Calendar, Tasks and Sent Items folders to delete or archive items that are older than two months.
  • Setting Outlook to empty the deleted items folder every time you exit the program.
  • Checking the size of your mailbox and personal folders to see where the most messages are located to help you tidy up these areas.
  • Saving attachments to disk and then removing them from the messages.
  • Using rules to automatically sort email for you.