General Space-Saving Tips

Below are several tips for organizing and keeping your Colorado College e-mail account below your size limit. These are instructions relating to the full version of Microsoft Office Outlook, not Outlook Web Access (OWA).

• Consider compartmentalizing email accounts – have your work-related CC account, and a personal “fun” account (I.E., a GMail or Yahoo! e-mail account).

• Unsubscribe from listservs that you are too busy to read.

• See how much space messages take up so that you are more aware of large messages (under the View menu). Click here for more information on Features of Outlook.

• Delete or move large messages so they don’t count against your quota.

• Be sure that you’ve really deleted your unwanted messages (by emptying your Deleted Items folder).

• Target your “Sent Items” folder – do you really need to store copies of every message you send?

• Remember that appending the original text when you reply to a message makes the message longer (hence bigger).

• Attachments are generally “space hogs” compared to plain-text messages – especially PowerPoint slide shows and images.

What follows are five more detailed space-saving tips with “how to” instructions for accomplishing them:

1. Review your messages periodically and delete those that you do not need. This takes some time, but it is one of the best ways not to become a “pack rat” and store everything. Also, remember that finding important old messages among hundreds of unimportant ones takes a long time! Here are some tips to make this process easier:

• Plan to take a few minutes each day, each week, or each block, to scroll through your Inbox and find messages that you no longer need. Delete them.

• Consider sorting your Inbox by date, so that you might target the oldest messages for deletion. You can do this by clicking on the “Received” gray header button while viewing your Inbox. This button will allow you to sort your messages by most recent first (down-arrow) or by oldest first (up-arrow). It is a toggle switch, and you can switch view modes whenever you like.

• Consider sorting your Inbox by who sent the messages, so that you might target messages from a certain person, or mailing list. This might facilitate deleting many messages at once from a given individual or listserv. You can sort in this way by clicking on the “From” gray header button while viewing your Inbox. This button will allow you to sort your messages from A-Z, or from Z-A, in a toggle-like fashion.

If you have many messages to delete at once, here are two helpful tips for selecting multiple messages and working with them as a group:

• For adjacent messages, hold down the SHIFT key while you click the first and the last.

• For non-adjacent messages, hold down the CTRL key while you select each message.

2. Consider NOT saving copies of all messages that you send out. By default, Microsoft Outlook saves copies of all outgoing messages into the “Sent Items” folder. Some people appreciate the thorough “paper trail,” but many more don’t even realize that Outlook is doing this, and they don’t have a need to keep copies of more than a few important messages that they create. Over time, the “Sent Items” folder can get quite large. If you do not need to store copies of all outgoing messages, here is how to de-activate the feature:

• Under the Tools menu, click “Options.”

• Click on “Email Options…” in the top right of the box.

• Un-check the box marked “Save copies of messages in Sent Items folder.”

A couple of additional notes about this point:

• Consider “carbon-copying” yourself on important messages, so that you have a record of selected messages that you need to store.

• By default, the Sent Items folder is installed with “AutoArchive” turned on. The default aging period is 2 months, and messages older than this are moved into an archive folder on your hard drive. With the AutoArchive feature, you have several choices: on or off; move items or delete items; 2 months or some other window of time. For more on this feature, see Point #5 below.

3. Be sure that you’re really deleting items. When you delete messages, they are stored in the “Deleted Items” folder. This folder is housed on the server, and hence messages stored within it are still taking up server space! By default, the Deleted Items folder is installed with AutoArchive turned on, and after 2 months, messages are truly deleted. But if you spend some time cleaning out old messages because you have reached your quota, it could be 2 months before you’d reclaim that server space if you didn’t take one of the following actions:

• Under the Tools menu, click “Empty Deleted Items Folder.”

To more globally ensure that deleted messages are purged when you log out of Outlook, you can do the following:

• Under the Tools menu, click “Options.”

• Click on the “Other” tab.

• Check the box marked “Empty the Deleted Items folder upon exiting.”

4. Use personal folders files. A personal folders file (with a .pst extension) is located on your C: or H: drive, but it is NOT located on the mail server. Personal folders files contain folders, messages, and files. This is an ideal way to save large quantities of messages for future reference but not take up limited server space in the process. You can have one large .pst file, or you can create several .pst files organized as separate folders. Here is how to set up a personal folder file:

• For instructions on creating a personal folders file, Click Here.
• Once your personal folder file is created, you can store messages in it. Simply select and drag messages from your Inbox, or from other folders on the server, into your new personal folders file.
• Note: You can make backup copies of your .pst files by copying them between drives. For example, you might choose to store your .pst file on your C: drive, but periodically, you can back it up onto your H: drive.

5. Use the AutoArchive feature. AutoArchive is a two-step process. First, you activate the feature on the “Other” tab in the Options dialog box (under the Tools menu). Select the desired time frame (for example, one week, or 2 months) and determine whether you’re moving items to a .pst file or deleting them. Second, you activate AutoArchive for each folder that you want archived. You can automatically archive individual folders, groups of folders, or your entire set of folders. The AutoArchive properties of each folder are checked by date, and old items are moved to the specified archive file (or deleted, if you so choose). As mentioned above, several Outlook folders (such as Calendar, Sent Items, and Deleted Items) are installed with AutoArchive activated. AutoArchive saves messages into a personal folder file format (.pst).

• To activate AutoArchive on a given folder, right-click the folder and choose “Properties” from the menu which appears. In the window that appears, click on the “AutoArchive” tab. Check the box next to the description “Archive items in this folder using the default settings.”

Final Hint : An excellent strategy for backing up email messages combines #4 and #5. Create a personal folder file following the steps in #4 above. Then, select a server folder that you would like to automatically archive, as in step #5 above. Set up AutoArchive for that server folder, so that contents will be moved (in the time frame selected by you) into the personal folder file. This will allow you to easily view the older contents when you need them, but they will not take up server space!

For more detailed instructions on Personal Folders and AutoArchiving, please click here.

Last revised on 07/01/09

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