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Technology

Email Quota Management

Simmons faculty, staff, and students have a mail quota of 200MB. The amount of space your email is taking up on the server includes all of your email in all of your mailboxes (e.g. in box and sent mail), and all of your attachments.

There are a several ways to check to see how close you are to your quota.

  1. Log into Simmons Webmail.  Your Quota Status will be displayed in megabytes and as a percentage at the top of every list of email messages, in the center of the screen.
    screen shot showing quota in Webmail

  2. Many email clients allow you to check your quota and see a list of how much room each of your folders is consuming. If you connect to the Simmons server via POP (see Set Up Email Software to Access Simmons Account), you are unlikely to reach your quota unless you do not access your mail frequently, or you have not set POP to delete or download messages from the server.  

    1. Apple Mail: control-click on your Simmons account or any of the email folders on the Simmons server, and choose Get Info. You will see a list of all of your folders, the amount of space they consume, and the status of your quota.
    2. Mozilla Thunderbird: check the Thunderbird FAQ.
    3. Microsoft Outlook: to see how large a given folder is, click on the folder (or on the entire account), right-click, and select Properties. Outlook will not show you how this compares to the amount of space you have left on the server. See option #1 to find that information.

I've reached my quota, what do I do?

The simple answer is: remove enough email from the server that your email usage will be below the quota again. But more information will help you decide how to do that . . .

Once you have reached 90% of your quota, the mail server will automatically notify you, once a day. Once you reach your quota, the mail server will bounce messages back to people trying to send you mail, until you get below your quota again.

In order to move below your quota quickly, it may be helpful for you to sort your mail to determine which messages are the largest and delete or move those off the server first. This is a particularly good strategy if you know you were well below your quota recently: someone may have sent you a very large attachment; saving the attachment elsewhere and deleting that message may be all you need to do. To sort by size, make sure your email software is showing a column for size, and click on that column. In WebMail, click Size, which is the far right column.

Deleting Messages and Managing Trash

Different email clients (e.g. Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, and WebMail) have different ways of dealing with mail you have deleted. Understanding how your software treats deleted mail will also help you manage your email quota. Depending on which email software you use (and how you have set your preferences), it may move deleted messages (but not remove them from the server), or display them with a strikethrough (but not actually remove them from the server), or fully remove them from the server. However, almost every email client has a similar method for doing basic clean-up.

WebMail can always help you remove unwanted messages
Whether or not you use WebMail as your primary email client, you can use it to purge deleted messages.

  1. Unless you have changed your default configuration of WebMail, all messages that are marked for deletion but are still on the server are shown in a Virtual Trash folder. To view deleted messages that still reside on the server, use the Open Folder pull-down menu at the top right of your WebMail screen.
    1. Choose Virtual Trash at the very bottom of the Open Folder pull-down menu. The screen that opens will show all email messages that you have deleted but are still on the Simmons server.
    2. Click Empty Trash at the top of the WebMail screen to permanently remove all of these messages from the server. You can click Empty Trash at any time using WebMail to purge your deleted messages. You do not have to first view the Virtual Trash.

Other email clients provide alternate ways to manage your email
Generally speaking, under one of the menus, there will be an option to "Purge Deleted," "Empty Trash," or something to that effect. Choosing this option will probably remove from the server messages you have "marked for deletion" or believe you already deleted. Unfortunately, it is often more complicated than merely emptying your trash. Some email clients delay sending the "empty trash" command to the email server for a week or more. The easiest way to check whether your email software is really purging your deleted messages is to log into WebMail and note whether what you thought you had deleted and purged appears in WebMail with a strikethrough. If it does, your email client has not sent the purge command to the mail server.

By way of example, here is how you change that option in Apple Mail:

  1. From the Mail menu, choose Preferences, and click Accounts.
  2. Go to the Mailbox Behaviors tab, and under Trash, change "Permanently erase deleted messages when:" to Quitting Mail.
  3. Quit Mail. The messages that were in your trash, that you emptied from the trash have now actually been removed from the mail server.

Emptying the Trash May Not Be Enough

You may have properly deleted and purged all of the email messages you no longer want and are still over quota. There are other places to look for email that is taking up your quota.

Sent messages can accumulate quickly
Most people choose to save a record of each email they have sent. Often they are saved to a folder called "Sent" or "sent-email". This folder can end up using a lot of quota space, especially if you send a few hundred messages per week. You can deal with this in a couple of ways:

  1. Periodically look at your sent messages and delete (and purge) any of those messages you do not truly need for record keeping purposes.
  2. If you use an email client other than WebMail, you will have a place in your email program called Local Folders. Sometimes this is referred to as "Personal Folders". Email stored under this section is removed from the server and kept permanently on the hard drive of your computer. Local Folders are a perfect way to store sent messages and all other messages you wish to keep for the record.

Attachments can quickly make you reach your quota
Many people use email as a method of transferring files other than text messages. Files such as Powerpoint presentations, video files, and photos can be very large in size. It is possible that just one of these attachments is more than your quota allows.

You can deal with attachments in varying ways:

  1. Save the attachment to your computer and delete (and purge) the original email that contained the attachment
  2. If you use WebMail as your primary email client, there is a feature to strip attachments from your email messages and from those sent messages you have saved.

Automatic Maintenance Can Avoid Problems

If you do use WebMail as your primary email client, you can avoid a build-up of deleted email on the server by using automatic Login Tasks.

Other email clients often have a similar method of configuring automatic maintenance functions. Check your various Account Settings and Options that appear in your chosen email client.