Email is a wonderful tool. It makes communicating with fellow workmates, friends and family very easy. One little-known side effect of such ease in communication is the effect on server resources.
Every email sent or received is stored on the email server. Multiply the space used for each message, by the number of emails sent and received each day, by the number of people who use a USQ email account, by 356 days a year and the resultant use of resources explodes exponentially. If all emails were stored and rarely deleted, then in the event of a service breakdown, there would be no guarantee that every single message and mailbox could be successfully restored. This is why it is necessary for every email user to practice good filing methods to manage the amount of email stored.
The flow of email through a mailbox
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 the email for two months, delete or archive it.
Archive emails to your Personal Folders area. When it gets to a certain size, you will be asked to clean it out or have it burnt to CD for final archiving. Creating a CD is a fee-for-service provided by ITS.
Set Auto Archiving on the Calendar, Tasks and Sent Items folders to delete or archive items that are older than two months
Set Outlook to Empty the Deleted Items folder every time you exit the program
Check the Size of your Mailbox and Personal Folders to see where the most messages are located to help you tidy up these areas
Save Attachments to disk then remove them from the messages
Use Rules to automatically sort email for you
Archiving can be done manually or automatically. To make the process automatic, set the Auto Archiving properties for each folder and let Outlook handle the process for you.
Tip – Only set Auto Archiving on your Calendar, Tasks and Sent Items folders. Items that you wish to keep should be moved to your Personal Folders.
For a full explanation of Archiving,
please refer to Chapter 9 – Archiving
Information in Outlook – in the
ITS Outlook 2000 Email
Introduction Course Notes. Please note that the Outlook Course Notes
are only given to participants who have already attended the Outlook 98 or Email
and Archiving Workshop held at ITS.
back
If you regularly receive email from a number of sources, but do not wish to read the messages immediately, you can set up a folder/rule system to file these messages for you.
Create a new folder in your Personal Folders area
Create a rule to move the message from your Inbox to this folder. Note that this rule will only work when Outlook is open and running on your computer. The rule will not work in Webmail.
Keep any Subscribe and List emails first sent to you when you subscribe to a listserve or discussion/distribution list. Just make sure you regularly delete any unwanted emails from this folder.
The Sent Items folder keeps a copy of every email you send and can take up a lot of space on the server. If you use the Calendar and Tasks, then these two folders should also be archived.
To set Auto Archiving properties for the Calendar, Tasks and Sent Items folders:
Right-click on the folder
Select Properties from the shortcut menu displayed
Property dialog box is displayed
Select the Auto Archive tab and set the options available here, for example
The Deleted Items folder stores everything deleted from other folders within Outlook. As a result it can become quite large in size. However, you can set folder properties to automatically empty the Deleted Items folder when you exit Outlook.
Tip - If you find yourself referring to the Deleted Items folder then you should archive those emails elsewhere, until you no longer need them. The Deleted Items folder should only be used for items that you definitely no longer require.
To automatically Empty the Deleted Items folder:
Choose Tools Options from the menu
Options dialog box opens
Click on Other tab at top of dialog box
Click in the checkbox Empty the Deleted Items folder upon exiting
Click OK to close the Options dialog box
Items deleted within the last five days may be recovered. The item must have been deleted (i.e. moved to the Deleted Items folder) and then permanently deleted to be considered recoverable using the following method.
To recover a Permanently Deleted Item:
Click on the Deleted Items folder (This step is critical as the folder must be selected for the following steps to work.)
Select Tools from the menu
Select Recover Deleted Items
The Recover Deleted Items window is displayed
Scroll through the list and highlight the email/s you need to recover. (Hold down the Control key and click on each email to select non-adjacent emails)
Click on the
Recover Selected Items Toolbar
button to put the message back into your Deleted Items 
It is likely that your Inbox, Deleted Items and Sent Items folders will contain the most messages.
To check the size of your Mailbox:
Right-click on Outlook Today – Mailbox of [username]
Shortcut menu opens
Choose Properties for Outlook Today from the shortcut menu
Mailbox properties dialog box opens
At the bottom left-corner, click on the Folder Size button.
Folder Size dialog box opens showing each folder in your Mailbox and it’s size
To check the size of your Personal Folders:
If you do not have your folders list open, choose View Folders List from the menu
Right-click on Personal Folders in the Folders list
Shortcut menu opens
Choose Properties of your “Personal Folders” from the shortcut menu
Personal Folders properties dialog box opens
At the bottom left-corner, click on the Folder Size button.
Folder size dialog box opens displaying each folder in your Personal Folders area and it’s size.
Attachments use a lot of space. When you attach a file to an email message, the message increases from its original size of message and attachment, to message plus attachment plus other information. For example, Wendy’s Mailbox is 12 megabytes in size and contains over 41 000 items. None of these items contain attachments. Fran’s Mailbox is also 12 megabytes in size but only holds 500 items as most of messages contain attachments. These examples are taken from current staff mailboxes (but the names have been changed).
The best way to deal with attachments, is to save them to another location (outside of email) and then remove the attachment from the message.
To save the attachment to disk:
Double-click on the message to open it in a separate window
Choose File Save Attachments from the menu
Save Attachment dialog box opens
Navigate to the location where you want to store the attached file
Click on OK
To remove the attachment from a message:
Double-click on the message to open it in a separate window
Click once on the attachment to select
Press Delete on the keyboard or click the Delete button on the message toolbar
Close the message
A prompt appears confirming that you want to save changes
Click on Yes
As a general rule, any message with an attachment or message over 1000 bytes (or B) in size should be deleted or archived immediately you have read or actioned it. You can add a Size field to your Inbox to display the size of every email you receive.
For example, this section of an Inbox (below) shows the Attachment and Size columns. The emails that should be archived are the two with an attachment – 19 kb and 159 kb respectively. It would also help to archive the 1010 bytes message as well.
To add the Size Column to your Inbox:
Right-click on the Column Heading on the right-hand side of the Outlook window
Shortcut menu opens
Select Field Chooser from the menu
Drag Size from the Field Chooser list to the column headings as shown below
This will show you the size of the email and attachment
The Rules Wizard in Outlook is extremely useful for automatically organizing your messages, both received and sent, into folders for either filing or reading purposes.
Tip – Do not use a rule to move unread messages into a folder which is inside another folder. By keeping all folders one level below the Personal Folders, you will be able to find your unread email quickly.
Rules are explained fully on pages 36-39 of the ITS Outlook 98 Introduction Course Notes, or pages 60-63 of the ITS Outlook 2000 Email Introduction Course Notes.
We understand that everyone is busy but we strongly recommend you consider attending Outlook 2000 training as it will help you to save time by using the many features Outlook has. Further information is available at the ITS Training site - http://www.usq.edu.au/its/training