You've Got (Too Much!) Mail

As e-mail has become the preferred form of communication in the workplace, users are amassing more and more e-mail messages than ever before. Users save messages related to projects, changes to jobs, budgets, department meetings, and even humor for extended periods of time and in some cases, indefinitely. As e-mail begins to pile up in a user's mailbox, technical not to mention organizational problems begin to occur.

A February 2001 survey revealed that 34% of US respondents cite e-mail as the primary support issue in their organization. Mail client applications, such as Outlook, become slower and slower to respond as a user's mailbox size gets larger and larger. This slowness and instability prompts calls to the Leapfrog help desk daily. In some cases very large mailboxes can cause the mail client application to become unstable and corrupt.

Another problem stemming from too much saved mail is insufficient storage. It is not unusual today to find a user (or users) in an organization with a mailbox approaching 1GB in size! This is especially impactful for companies hosting their own email server. Imagine 50 mailboxes at an average size of 500MB each. That's almost 25GB of storage just to maintain the current amount of saved e-mail messages.

Four Steps to Reduce the Size of your Mailbox

All of us are guilty so What should we do to avoid these problems? Clean out your inbox and organize! Here are a few tips on managing your mailbox:

Keep only new messages and those requiring action in the Inbox and Delete messages that are no longer needed. Move messages that you need to keep into another folder. Create mail folders for storing messages that will make it easy to find a specific message later.
Empty the Deleted Items/Trash folder. If you have deleted a message because you no longer need it, don't be afraid to empty the Deleted Items. Many users do not empty the Deleted Items/Trash folder, using it as a backup scheme-in case they need old e-mail messages.
Empty the Sent Items/Sent folder. Some users have never purged their Sent Items/Sent folder. They are maintaining a record of every e-mail they have ever sent. Much of the needless message storage can be found here. Delete all sent messages that are older than 6 months, or 3 months, or whatever date you find comfortable.
Archive your old e-mail. Most e-mail client applications have a feature for Auto-Archiving emails older than a certain date. So click "Yes" when you are prompted by Outlook to Archive and select a place on the network to save your data.

Simply, take a little time to unclutter your mailbox. Your mail application will be more stable, you'll need less storage space, and you'll find it easier to process and find the messages that remain in your mailbox.

For more information on email bottlenecks visit the websites of: People PC.

This article originally appeared in the December, 2002 issue of FrogTalk.