How often do you open an email and then wonder what to do with it? Do you hover your mouse over different folders, wondering where to store the email because you ran out of time to read it? Do you often file emails in a folder marked “later”… a bracket of time which never comes? Or do you leave such emails in your inbox, allowing them to move further and further down the queue as new, higher priority emails come through?
These are not trick questions. Most people don’t have a strategy for managing their email and this not only impacts the performance of your IT systems, but can also mean productivity issues and lost communications amongst staff and customers.
We asked Dermot Crowley, Founding Director of Adapt Training Solutions to give us a hand. Dermot helps organisations get a handle on their email and productivity problems.
He says, “When people don’t keep their inbox clear the disadvantages for the organisation are twofold. One, a reduction in productivity. If people are not on top of their inboxes, they feel stressed, overwhelmed, lose things, are slow to respond and tend to leave things to the last minute. A second issue is the mailbox space being tied up by oversized mailboxes. This is a very real data issue, and has ramifications for the safety of the data, the speed of the systems and the speed of recovering data if there is a server crash”.
Keep your mailbox size under 1.5GB
The most common methods for storing emails are either on a server system using Microsoft Exchange or stored locally using a PST file. Microsoft recommends that with either of these methods, it’s important to keep a handle on how much email you store, and there are numerous reasons for this.
I Know IT suggest keeping your mailbox under 1.5GB (gigabytes). While you might see your inbox as a series of email, all of these emails and attachments are stored in a database somewhere. The bigger the database grows the less efficient it becomes or will require more maintenance to stay efficient.
We’ve seen some people with 3 or more gigabytes of mail per user. That might not sound like such a big deal, but if you multiply that by the number of people in your company, it can cause the system to underperform or, cause corruption to the data itself.
Different IT experts have varying views on this. Some companies suggest as low as 200MB whereas others say ‘add more storage’ – we try to keep a balance between not utilising all of the storage on our clients servers versus not nagging them to clean up their mailbox all of the time.
This little how-to here will show you how to check your mailbox size on:
Set some mailbox size limits to keep control in your hands
Many organisations set a storage limit to help regulate the amount of email that employees store. We activate a quota system for our clients, the user can be alerted on screen when they are reaching or have exceeded a mailbox size limit.
Quotas are generally only available for those companies using Microsoft Exchange, unless a third party tool is used. It is a very simple, easy method for managing the amount of mail that you and your team store and any I Know IT Engineer can turn this on for you.
How do we keep a handle on email before the mailbox gets too big?
We asked Dermot Crowley for some quick tips on managing email more efficiently:
OK, we just need to hang on to our emails – what are some strategies for archiving?
A big trap many people fall into is to hit the “archive” button in Microsoft Outlook without really knowing where those archives are being stored. If the archived email is stored on a desktop or a notebook, and that machine fails or is stolen, all of the historical email goes with it. We don’t recommend this method for obvious reasons.
Instead of using Outlook archiving, you can use an online archiving service. I Know IT will be launching a set of tools shortly to help you archive online for several years if you need that level of certainty and security.
You can also archive on to your own server using an archiving application such as GFI Mail Essentials which stores all of your older emails in a separate database, away from your Exchange but stored locally at your office so it can be backed up.
However you choose to manage your email, we learned through our own experience that having a systemised approach as well as a communicated company procedure on how to file mail has made a big difference here at I Know IT. Now, how to handle all of your service requests…
Any more advice for keeping on top of emails and time management in general?
There is a book on this subject I quite like. If you’re really wanting to master Microsoft Outlook as your main system of managing email, contacts, tasks and notes I strongly recommend Take Back Your Life by McGhee Productivity Solutions. You can get this from Borders or one of the online retailers.
Alternatively, if you’re wanting your entire team on the same page I recommend a training program such as those offered by Adapt Training.
By now you’ve possibly already figured out the analogy in the subject – but if you’re wondering what I mean by ‘Your Email is Like Chewing Gum’ is because you stick it under the desk when you don’t feel like chewing, but then you forget about it… and by the time you remember, it needs to be removed with a scraper.
If you have a success story you’d like to tell about how you manage your email, we’d love to hear it. Post a comment or send an email to 
