Managing Your Exchange Mailbox
This info is to help keep your mailbox down to size and to work with e-mail and other Exchange facilities.
Deleting Messages
The first way to minimise the space taken up by your e-mail is to delete unneeded messages from the Inbox. Note, what you must do to definitively get rid of no longer needed messages and free up space:
If you habitually use an e-mail client (such as Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Windows Mail) configured for POP3, you are downloading the messages to your hard disk. Go to Tools - Accounts and click on the Properties for your "postoffice.eui.eu" account. Select the Advanced tab.
If "Leave a copy of messages on server" is ticked, then your mail is being duplicated on both the mailserver and your hard disk. You can choose to have messages removed from the mail server when you delete them definitively from Outlook Express.
Alternatively you need to use the "postoffice" (see below) periodically to clean up your mailbox on the Exchange server.
On the other hand, that if you unselect the option "Leave a copy of messages on server", your e-mail will be automatically deleted from the mailserver when it is downloaded into the Outlook Express Local Folders.
This may be convenient, but it means you won’t have access to those same messages via the "postoffice" or using another e-mail program on a different computer.
If you use Outlook Express in IMAP mode, then you are reading your new mail directly on the mail server, from which you can therefore delete it directly. (You can also move messages from the mailserver Inbox to folders you create locally in Outlook Express.)
Go to Tools - Options and click on the Maintenance tab and make the desired choices regarding what to do with deleted messages.
If you use Microsoft Outlook or the "postoffice" Outlook Web Access, deleting messages from your Inbox means removing them directly from the mailserver. Remember, however, that messages are only definitively deleted when the "Deleted Items" folder is emptied.
Those who work principally with Outlook or WebMail should keep in mind that it is not only the Inbox that gets filled up in this case. The "Sent Items" folder, containing copies of all outgoing messages—including their attachments—is also located directly on the mail server and needs to be cleaned up periodically.
Attachments occupy a great deal of space in both the Inbox and the Sent Items folder. Outlook gives you the possibility of removing attachments from messages while preserving the message text. Just right-click on the attachment icon when you have the message open, and make the appropriate choice from the menu. The attached files, from both incoming and outgoing messages, you have probably saved somewhere else, anyway.
Outlook provides archiving functions, which can be utilised both manually and automatically (AutoArchive) to either delete or move items older than a specified date. Moving items to storage in this way implies the creation of a personal folder file (.pst) either on the local hard disk (D: for users with standard cloned office PCs) or on the server area G:. Items (e-mail messages, etc.) transferred to such a file remain readily accessible to the user in their original format.
AutoArchive is a two-step process. First, turn on AutoArchive. On the Tools menu, click Options, click the Other tab, then click AutoArchive and make the appropriate choices.
Second, set the AutoArchive properties for each folder to be archived: right-click on the folder, choose Properties, click the AutoArchive tab, and make the appropriate choices.
For more information, consult "archive" under Microsoft Outlook Help.
Make sure that Journaling is not turned on. Go to Tools - Options - Journal Options, and unselect all items so that nothing is recorded.
If Journaling was previously activated, click the button AutoArchive Journal Entries... and use the archiving facility described above to manually get rid of all entries.
Finally, Outlook offers the possibility to see exactly how much space you are occupying on the mail server. With the cursor highlighting the folder or icon Outlook Today, which represents your entire "mailbox" (i.e. all the folders existing for your account on the mail server), right-click and select "Properties for ..." from the menu. Then click the button Folder Size.... The window that opens up will show you the overall size plus the size of each individual folder and subfolder in your mailbox. (See also the page How to check the size of your mailbox .)
