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How To Keep Your Disk Usage Down
Deleting unwanted emails
For most users there is no reason to keep everything you recieve in email. The easiest way to maintain low disk usage in your email is to view your emails by size. If you list this view by largest emails first you can then save the large attachments and then delete the large emails you don't need first. This strategy will give you the most bang for the buck in freeing up the most space in your email for the least amount of work.
Once you've removed all the large emails, you can then view your emails by subject and, for example, if you get marketing emails from Amazon or Ebay, you can sort by subject and delete all of these emails at once if they use the same subject pattern.
Archiving Emails
Apple Mail on Macs
In the left column in Apple Mail is a section called "On My Mac". Any email folders and emails copied and pasted or dragged into this section is stored locally on the machine. Users can copy and paste emails from their Exchange inboxes into the folders in "On My Mac" to create a local archive of the emails. Keep in mind, however, that any emails you put here will ONLY be available in this particular local machine. This may not work if you require your archives to be available on all the machines you use.
Please contact us if you need ideas for a more distributed Mac Apple Mail archive solution. As a general practice, syncing programs like Busy Sync are not recommended because of their latent instability once the program falls into an irrecoverable failure mode.
Outlook 2011 on Macs
With few exceptions, we do not recommend anyone use Outlook 2011 for Macintosh as their email client to access their MIT Exchange email and calendaring. Outlook 2011 lacks the external file features found in both Apple Mail and Outlook 2010 for Windows which would make recovery from a failure straightforward and easy. Instead, Outlook 2011 for Mac stores all emails and calendaring data in one massive proprietary database that cannot be recovered once the database becomes corrupted. What's worse the chances for data corruption and actual performance degradation increases with the size of the data base.
Outlook 2010 on Windows
Microsoft Outlook 2010 has a nifty feature enabling users to create a pdf file to store emails locally. Microsoft has some instructions on how to do this here:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/create-an-outlook-data-file-pst-to-save-your-information-HA010355677.aspx
Quota
The standard Email quota for Exchange users is 2GB. Sometimes research projects or administrative functions require users to keep more emails on record than the system may initially allow. To request a quota increase to 4GB, you can send an email to network-exchange@mit.edu asking for the quota increase up to 4GB. For more space than this, you may need your AO or Section head to make the request to network-exchange@mit.edu .
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