Whether
you know it or not, you could be using more disk space for your email
accounts than you actually need to. In fact, many customers pay for
disk space overage for email when there are steps they can take that
can significantly reduce their email disk space usage, especially for
those customers who use IMAP rather than POP3 for their incoming mail
protocol or who use the webmail interface more often than an email
client.
There are three main folders that tend to retain mail
longer than they have to: Junk-Email (for people using Microsoft Office
Outlook 2003), Deleted Items and Sent Items. The first two folders will
generally hold emails that are no longer useful or necessary to keep
for extended periods of time. The Sent Items folder is a bit different
as people do tend to use this folder as a repository for important
communication. However, this does not mean there are not steps you can
take to minimize the number of files stored on the mail server and
therefore reduce your disk space usage.
Don’t Just Delete Messages, Purge Folders As Well
Many
people who use the webmail interface or IMAP think that when they
delete a message, it’s removed from a mail server. However, this is not
necessarily the case. When you delete a message from the webmail
interface, or if you delete a message using an email client that
connects to the mail server using IMAP, the mail server will only
dispose of that deleted message in one of four ways (ways that you
control when you set up the account within the mail server): the server
will auto-purge the email, it will move the deleted message to the
Deleted Items folder, it will mark the message as deleted, or it will
mark the message as deleted and hide it. Only the first option will
automatically remove the deleted messages from the server and remove
the messages from your email disk total. If you select any one of the
other three options, you would need to manually purge the messages
either through the web mail interface or from within your email client.
Purging messages is the only way to truly remove deleted messages from
your email allocations.
The Junk-Email Folder
Created
automatically by Outlook 2003 and used to handle spam messages, the
Junk-Email folder can generally be purged on a daily or weekly basis
after you are confident that the messages Outlook flags as spam are, in
fact, just that. By default, the Junk E-mail Filter protection level is
set to Low, which is designed to catch the most obvious junk e-mail
messages. Any message that is caught by the Junk E-mail Filter is moved
to a special Junk E-mail folder, where you can retrieve or review it at
a later time. You can make the filter more aggressive, which may
mistakenly catch legitimate messages, or you can even set Microsoft
Office Outlook 2003 to permanently delete junk e-mail messages. As it
is difficult to have any spam filter catch incoming messages that are
only spam, you may want to check the Junk-Email folder occasionally
prior to deleting and purging messages. For more information on the
Outlook Junk-Email folder, check your Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
Help file, and do a search for “Junk Filter”.
The Deleted Items Folder
Depending
on how you have your email account set up, this folder is generally
where any messages you delete are stored. Again, simply storing
messages in this folder does not mean they are removed from your disk
space allocation. Quite the contrary, as they are still being stored on
the server, they still count against your disk space usage and add to
the number of messages that are stored on the server. Only by purging
this folder can you completely remove these messages off the server and
remove their collective size from your disk space allocation.
The Sent Items Folder
Whenever
you send a message, or reply to a message, a copy of that message is
stored in the Sent Items folder. Again, the accumulation of messages in
this folder detracts from your email allocation and adds to the number
of messages stored on the server. However, unlike the Junk-Email or
Deleted Items folders, many people want to retain the messages that are
stored in the Sent Items folder for later retrieval. While it is
possible to purge messages from Sent Items, it is recommended that
customers have some rule sets in place for how messages are deleted and
purged from this folder.
So What If I Don’t Want to Purge Messages?
Put
simply, you don’t have to. However, by removing older items from the
mail server you not only lower your chances of paying for disk space
overage you also help improve the performance of the mail server
itself. Regardless, if you don’t want to purge messages an alternative
would be to use an email client (Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, etc.) and
use that client to occasionally connect to your mail accounts. When you
use an email client from your desktop or laptop, you can create folders
on the desktop or laptop that you can use to locally archive older
email messages from any folder you create on the mail server. Doing
this not only gives you the ability to search through old email
communications, it also allows you to go back to the mail server and
delete and purge those messages that you have downloaded and stored
locally.