The Exchange Email system that MIT uses has a lot of nifty features but there are also key steps users can take to properly care for your email in order to keep your Exchange email and calendaring happy.
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 Locally
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 enters 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 for Mac OS 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 pst file to store emails locally on a Windows PC. 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
MS Outlook 2010 users should also be aware that pst files should not exceed 2GB in size. If your email archives are becoming too large you should break them up to keep these pst files under 2GB. Some instructions from Microsoft on how to manually manage this can be found here:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/archive-items-manually-HA010355564.aspx
Managing Your Email Quota
If you get a legitimate email from IS&T (assuming it's real and not a phishing email) indicating that you're out of quota in your Exchange account, the first thing you should do is launch a fresh browser window in Firefox and log into owa.mit.edu . Once you're logged in, OWA will be able to tell you if you're over quota as there will be a big warning box in the upper left corner of your web window.
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 .
Calendaring
There are a number of preventative measures people who use the Exchange calendaring need to be aware of in order to keep your calendar happy.
- All repeating events MUST have an END DATE. NEVER create a repeating event without an end date. Doing so could result in a really unhappy calendar that is slow, and pinwheels.
- If you get an error while creating or modifying an event, ALWAYS REVERT TO SERVER if that option is presented. You will need to create or re-edit the event again but at least you will stay online and the changes will go through the second time. There is an unusual bug with the Exchange server especially with iCal where the user can try to create or modify an event before the Exchange server has had a chance to write to the Exchange calendar. If you click on anything but REVERT TO SERVER, your Calendar will go offline permanently and any events you create will never get added to the Exchange calendar.
- When running your calendar, always check to make sure the calendar is online. In iCal as long as you don't see the triangle alert symbol next to the calendar name, your calendar is online. Offline calendars pose 2 critical issues:
- There is no network connectivity in the area which means your calendar won't actually get updated.
- There is already a bad calendar event in place which is forcing your calendar offline. In this situation, you will need to delete the bad event before your calendar can be taken back online. In our experience, bad events are usually repeating events that have no end date.
- NEVER ever use BOTH Outlook 2011 and Apple Mail on the same machine checking the same email account. Doing so can cause both mail apps to fight and can cause slow behavior and pinwheeling on the Mac.
- If you are Outlook 2011 user, NEVER use sync services. Make sure Sync Services stays off. This module in conjunction with 4 has caused more than a few problems on user machines causing massive slow downs and pinwheeling.