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 

Each Exchange user has the following quota limits:

• 150Mb - capacity limit of email storage (includes Calendar, Contacts etc.) on the Exchange server. If you exceed this quota you will not be able to send any messages until you bring your storage down.
• 135Mb - you will get warnings about your mailbox size at 135MB.
• 50Mb - size limit of a single message.
• 200Mb - upper limit of email storage on the Exchange server. If you exceed this 'upper' limit you will not be able to receive email.

As you approach the quota limit, you will receive an email notification. This is a good time to undertake some 'housekeeping'. If you reach the limit, you will be notified via email again and be unable to send mail until you have bought your email account back under quota.

Users of Webmail have a quota bar. When it turns amber it's time to remove unnecessary email.

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

Procedure:

1. click on the 'File' menu then 'Account Settings'.
2. click on the 'Account Settings' button.
3. click on the 'Data Files' tab.
4. click 'Add'.
5. type in the file name.
6. Leave the 'save as file type' as 'Outlook Data File'.

Creating Personal Folders - Office 2007

Procedure:

1. click on the 'File' button.
2. click 'New' and select 'Outlook Data File'.
3. in the new window, select 'Office Outlook Personal Folders File (.pst)'.
4. click 'Ok'.
5. in the box labelled 'File name', type in a name for the file.
6. click 'Ok'.
7. In the 'Create Microsoft Personal Folder' dialogue box type in the name for the new folder.
8. (Optional)Set a password if required.
9. click 'Ok' and the new folder should now appear in the mail folders list.

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Moving Email between Folders

1. Click on the email in your Inbox (or other folder)*.
2. drag it to the folder where you wish to store the mail.
3. release the button.

*to move a group of emails

1. click on the first message of the set.
2. hold 'Shift' key then click on the last message of the set.
3. release the 'Shift' key.
4. drag the email block to the folder where you wish to store the mail.

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. To minimise the risk of this users can:

• save the attachment to hard disk in a folder that is relevant to the file and then remove the attachment from the email. Consider editing the email to show the location of the saved attachment.
• save the attachment to hard disk in a folder that is relevant to the file and then delete the email if no longer needed (remember to empty the deleted email as well).
• arrange with people you regularly exchange large files with to use FTP to transfer large attachments.
• set up a 'rule' to transfer email messages with attachments straight to a personal folder.

Anti-virus precautions

Viruses and worms often use 'attachments' to spread. To prevent infection do the following:

1. install anti-virus software.
2. keep Virus Definitions up to date.
3. save all attachments to hard disk instead of opening them directly by double clicking on them.
4. 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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