Tips for Email Hygiene
and Other Email Information

 

Server Space Limits - Updated January 2006

In January 2006, the University adopted revised standards for faculty/staff e-mail storage at the recommendation of the Information & Instructional Technology Committee (IITC).  The Exchange email server automatically generates daily warning messages to each user who exceeds 45 mb of storage space on the email server. These messages will continue for as long as the user exceeds the limit.  Although the sending and receiving of messages will continue to be permitted, the recipient should take immediate action to reduce the size of their e-mail account.  Please refer to the revised Email Storage Guidelines for additional information.

 

Good e-Mail Hygiene

Users should regularly purge old or unneeded information from Exchange/Outlook (as well as the H-drive shared space). For those items you wish to archive, it is suggested that you consider moving them from the server to a personal folder on your desktop computer’s disk drive or other removable media such as CD or zip disk. You may also consider printing a message for paper filing/storage. Other space saving suggestions include periodic deletion of messages moved into the “Deleted Items” folder, deletion of messages retained in the “Sent Items” folder that are no longer required, and saving e-mail attachments to the desktop computer hard drive and then deleting them from the messages to which they are attached.

Tips for Managing Your Outlook Email for PC Users

Tips for Managing Outlook Email for MAC Users

 

Email Backups

Although the entire Exchange server data is backed up to tape storage on a weekly basis, the email server should not be viewed as a permanent repository for email, contacts, or calendar information. This full backup is used for catastrophic recovery of the server in the event of a hardware “crash” and is not designed for the recovery of individual messages or accounts. Thus, there is a slight chance that if a catastrophic server failure should occur, messages/data received in the Exchange server between the time of the failure and the latest weekly backup would be lost. You may choose to have email messages in an Exchange account stored in personal folders on your desktop computer’s disk drive in lieu of having them stored on the Exchange server. This option requires the user to personally back up the folders stored on the desktop computer to a removable media for storage in a safe location on a routine basis.

 

Please contact the Computer Services Help Desk at (205) 665-6520 between the hours of 8:00 am and 5:00 pm Monday through Friday with any questions or to request further assistance.  You can also email the Help Desk.

 

Updated January 2006