Outlook 2007 Managing your E-mail
Introduction
To cope with the amount of e-mail we receive, for each one we need to decide what to do with it:
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Delete it.
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Deal with it immediately.
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Deal with it later. You can use Follow Up flags to help with this.
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File it. You can specify different folders to file e-mail in. See also Archiving below.
You will find e-mail easier to find and manage if you keep the amount of space used by e-mail small. Note that attachments can cause a lot of the space used by e-mail.
The following techniques are designed to help you with this:
Archiving
Firstly, any e-mail which we have a statutory duty to keep or anything which University Policy determines we should keep (e.g. anything of a contractual nature) must be archived. Your department will have policies on this, and is able to set up folders for keeping this e-mail archive; your department administrator is able to specify, for each folder in the e-mail archive, who has access to it, and what the retention period should be. All you need to do is to move any appropriate e-mail into the correct Archive folder. You can later retrieve it from that archive folder.
Quota
Your quota is now 1GB. If there is a genuine need for a larger quota, please contact our Service Desk on IT.Services@lboro.ac.uk or telephone 01509 222333.
Mail Cleanup
From the Tools menu select Mailbox Cleanup.
View Mailbox Size
Firstly, you can click the View Mailbox Size button to see the space used in total, and separately for each of your e-mail and other folders:
Remember that the e-mail system keeps copies of all the e-mail you send in the Sent Items folder.
Deleted Items
Remember that you may have items in the Deleted Items folder (rather like the Recycle Bin in Windows, this allows you to undelete anything deleted in error). Click the View Deleted Items Size button to see the size of your deleted items. You can simply click the Empty button to empty the Deleted Items folder.
Find large or old items
If you need to delete e-mail, you can look for particularly large items by selecting the Find items larger than radio button, optionally changing the size in kilobytes (from the default 250) , and clicking Find...
Other values you might like to try:
- 5000 for Enormous
- 1000 for Huge
- 500 for Very Large
- 100 for Large
Alternatively, if you need to delete e-mail, you can select the Find items older than radio button, optionally changing the number of days old (from the default 90) , and clicking Find...
In either case you will see an Advanced Find dialogue:
You can rearrange the Advanced Find dialogue like your Inbox: drag the edges of column headings to make them wider or narrower, click in a column heading to sort by that column. Thus you can sort by Size and look for the largest items.
You can select all of the mail that has been found by pressing Ctrl+A;, you can select an individual mail item by clicking it; you can select a range of items by clicking the first and Shift+clicking the last; you can add items to your selection by Ctrl+Click, or add a range by Shift+Ctrl+Click.
Once you have mail items selected, you can press Delete to move them to the Deleted Items folder unless they are already in that folder, in which case they will be deleted. Or you can press Shift+Delete to permanently delete them. You can right-click and select options from a pop-up menu - these options include Move to Folder. You can open them by pressing Enter, or open a single mail item by double clicking it.
If your mail has attachments, see Dealing with Attachments below.
Conflicts
Finally, if you have copied mail items into another folder rather than moving them, you will then have two copies of the e-mail - this is called a "conflict". Click the View Conflicts Size button to see the size of such conflicts, and / or click the Delete button to delete the conflicts.
Click Close to close the Mailbox Cleanup dialogue.
Dealing with Attachments
When you receive an e-mail with attachments, you should decide what to do with them. However, if you didn't and you have opened an e-mail (e.g. from the Find window later on) then you can deal with it now.
Do you need to keep a copy of any of the attachments? If so, you can save them on your hard drive, and then remove them from the e-mail.
To save an attachment, either double-click and select Save or right-click and select Save As. In the Save dialogue ensure that you select a sensible folder to store the attachment so that you can find it later - a folder in My Documents for documents, or a folder in My Pictures for images - and ensure that the name is helpful too.
Now that you've saved the attachment (or decided that you didn't have to), you can remove the attachment from the e-mail by right-clicking and selecting Remove.
Deleted Items
Remember that you may have items in the Deleted Items folder (rather like the Recycle Bin in Windows, this allows you to undelete anything deleted in error).
If you wish to permanently delete an item, rather than press Delete or right-click and select Delete from the pop-up menu, hold down Shift while you press Delete or select Delete from the pop-up menu. This will permanently delete the item (you will not be able to recover it from the Deleted Items folder).
Alternatively, on occasions you can empty the Deleted Items folder by right-clicking it in Mail views's Navigation pane and selecting Empty "Deleted Items" Folder, or at any time from the Tools menu select Empty "Deleted Items" Folder.
If you are confident that you don't delete items by mistake, you can tell Outlook to always empty the Deleted Items folder every time you exit Outlook:
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From the Tools menu select Options.
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Select the Other tab click E-mail Options...
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Select Empty the Deleted Items folder upon exiting, and click OK.