Maintaining Mailbox Quota Using Microsoft Outlook

With the large amount of email sent and received on a daily basis, your mailbox can fill up quickly. The best way to keep your mailbox under the quota is to practice good email management.  You should routinely monitor the number of messages in each of your folders.

Email accounts for students are limited to 100 MB per person.  At 90 MB a warning is issued.  At 100 MB the ability to send email is suspended.  At 105 MB the mailbox is locked and can neither send nor receive mail.

Email accounts for faculty and staff are limited to 200 MB per person.  At 190 MB a warning is issued.  At 200 MB the ability to send email is suspended.  At 210 MB the mailbox is locked and can neither send nor receive mail. 

Remember approximately 1000KB = 1 MB.
 
Suggestions for Maintaining Mailbox quota:

1. Delete what you don′t need to save. Empty your "Deleted Items" folder! Right click on the Deleted Items folder and select "Empty Deleted Items".

2. You can set up your Outlook to automatically empty your deleted items:

• On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Other tab.
• Select the Empty the Deleted Items folder upon exiting check box.

3. E-mail attachments can use up a very large amount of space. Open attachments and save them to your hard drive and delete the message.

4. It is often beneficial to sort emails by size, and then remove the ones with large attachments. You can sort a folder by size by clicking the Arranged By: button and selecting Size.

5. To avoid email shut down, keep an eye on your mailbox size.  The Mailbox Cleanup utility is very helpful. Click on Tools in the Menu bar and select Mailbox Cleanup.

6. Click on the View Mailbox Size button to view the total size of your mailbox.

• Scroll the Folder Size window and note which folders are the largest.
• Close these windows and open the selected folder(s).
• Sort by size and delete the larger email that you no longer need.

7. Mailbox Cleanup also has a search function to help you find older or larger items in your mailbox.

8. Even if you have reduced your mailbox size to below 90 MB (for students) or 190 MB (for faculty and staff), it may take as long as two hours before the Exchange server removes its "flag" identifying you as being over quota.  Wait a few hours and try again!

9. You may also maintain your Mailbox quota by moving email messages that you want to save to a Personal Folder on your personal computer.  Email messages in Personal Folders do not contribute to your Mailbox quota.

Please note that Email messages have a 1 year life cycle.  Messages greater than 1 year old are purged from the Exchange server daily.  Saving messages to Personal Folders on your personal computer are not subject to being purged and can be kept there until you delete them.

If you have a general question about how to use Outlook, click on the Help and type a search word or phrase.