As we move into the month of October, most of the SHU community has now had MS Outlook for about 6 months or so. Some of you may have begun receiving the message that you are approaching the space quota for your file and that you need to take action. Please take that warning seriously, because if you ignore it and exceed your limit, you will not be able to send or receive any e-mail until the condition is cleared up.
Each Seton Hall user is allotted 500mb of space in their e-mail file. This space can get eaten up quickly if you generally receive a lot of mail and just leave it in the file. There are three things you can do right now to reduce the overall size of your e-mail file and keep you from approaching your limit.
First, delete any message you do not need to hold onto. Look through your Inbox, all of your folders and especially look at the Sent folder. I'm sure there are plenty of documents in there that you don't need anymore.
Second, when you delete an item, it goes to the Deleted Items folder and stays there until you empty it. Please, get in the habit of clearing out the Deleted Items folder once a week by clicking on Tools - Empty Deleted Items folder and click Yes to confirm.
Third, when a message arrives with a file or files attached, that message's size is probably quite large and eating up your e-mail file space. A good thing to do is open the message by double-clicking it, then double-click the attachment and save it to a drive of your choice. Then right-click the attachment and Remove it from the message. You may still save the message if you'd like, but its size has been substantially reduced by removing the attachment.
You should then think about setting up archiving as a way of keeping the file under control. To get to the settings in Outlook, select Tools - Options - click the Other tab - Auto Archive. The dialog box that appears enables you to set up archiving to your own requirements.
The first field asks how often to run the archive. If you are nearing the file space allotment, I would suggest running the archive every day. In the middle of the box you would designate how old an item has to be to be archived. You can select a certain number of months, weeks or days. You have to determine what setting you are comfortable with. The archived items are stored in a personal folder under your Documents folder and it will display in your Outlook navigation pane, so you can quickly access it if need be.
I hope these tips will help and I hope everyone realizes that we all have to work at keeping our e-mail files under control. If you need help or have questions concerning your e-mail/archiving, etc., please contact me at x2161 or at otskeybi@shu.edu.
