Managing a busy Exchange email account is important. To help you ISS have put together a few tips.
If you receive a considerable amount of email you may find that you exceed your quota. If this is the case you will be sent messages advising that your email message box won't work until you reduce it. You can reduce and manage your mailbox by following the steps below.
Quotas
Most staff in the University use the 'Exchange' email system, whilst most students use the 'Webmail' (Unix) email system on Unix. Both systems are quotored meaning there is an upper limit to the amount of email that can be stored.
Exchange Quota Limits
How much email space do I have as a member of Staff?
How much email space do I have as a Postgraduate student or Researcher?
Users of Webmail have a quota bar. When it turns amber it's time to remove unnecessary email. Information on increasing your email quota - How to: Increase your email quota
Personal Folders
Everything in your 'Inbox', 'Sent Mail' and 'Outbox' folders counts within your quota. In exchange, all your 'Calendar', 'Contacts' and 'Journal' entries also count.
To help you manage your email in Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010, you can create 'Personal Folders' which store messages on your local hard disk rather than on the Exchange server. This avoids the quota problem, but you must remember emails stored on your local hard drive are not backed up. If you want to keep these, ISS strongly recommends you copy them.
Creating Personal Folders - Office 2010
How to: Create Personal Folders in Outlook 2010
Creating Personal Folders - Office 2007
How to: Create a folder in Outlook 2007.
How to: Move e-mails to an archive Personal Folder file (.pst) in Microsoft Outlook 2007.
More mail and archiving advice can be read on the University Records Management pages.
Attachments
The main source of 'over quota problems' are attachments. Attachments are usually considerably larger than simple text emails. A single email with a very large attachment can push you over quota. How to: Save space in an over-quota Exchange email account
Anti-virus precautions
Viruses and worms often use 'attachments' to spread. To prevent infection do the following:
- install anti-virus software.
- keep Virus Definitions up to date.
- save all attachments to hard disk instead of opening them directly by double clicking on them.
- Update Windows regularly. New vulnerabilities are continually exploited, but can be avoided if Windows is updated.
Spam (unsolicited mail)
Delete all Spam on sight and never reply to the 'remove me from this list' links. For more information on Spam click this link.
Delete/Recover Outlook Messages
Follow this link to Delete/Recover Messages in Microsoft Exchange.
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