E-Mail Problems

Recently, I've noticed several people with "over quota" problems, so I figured I'd post this reminder with some tips about managing your email. Some of these tips are specific to NCSU IMAP mail users, some are specific to Thunderbird users (the mail client that EIT supports) and some are appropriate to anyone.

Stop using email for all communications
Email is not always the best tool to use for communications. Consider moving some of what you are doing via email to a better tool. Some of these include:

• Google Docs or Zoho for sharing and collaborating on documents, spreadsheets and presentations
  
• Slideshare.net for sharing presentations
• drop.io or dropbox.com for filesharing
  
• Delicious.com for sharing websites that you find interesting
• Feed readers (i.e. Google Reader and many others) for 'newsletters' if offered.
• Instant Messaging for quick questions/answers/short discussions
• Twitter, Facebook and blogs for keeping others informed about projects, your life, etc.
• Flickr, Picasa, Snapfish, Facebook, etc. for sharing photos
  

I can think of very few good reasons to put an attachment in an email message.

Maximize your quota
First thing to do is to make sure you have all the quota you are entitled to.
From Thunderbird, go to Edit -> Folder Properties and click on the "Quota" tab. This will tell you how much of your quota you are using and how much quota you have available. If you have less than 200MB (200,000KB), then you will want to request more by going to: http://sysnews.ncsu.edu/. After you have logged in, the "User Info" section has your ITD Account Quotas listed. Click on "Quota Manager" to make any changes. If you are not using the AFS space or Novell space, you can max your email quota at 200MB for free. If you need more than that, you can purchase more by going to: https://sysnews.ncsu.edu/tools-bin/usmdb-purchase.

Empty Spam folder
You probably need to do this fairly regularly (every week or two). You can select all the messages in the Spam folder (click on the "+" sign to the left of Inbox in Thunderbird to see your folders) and delete them. An easier and often faster way to do this is to login to Webmail (http://webmail.ncsu.edu/) and click on "Purge" to the right of your Spam folder.

Have your trash emptied automatically
From the Tools -> Account Settings window select Server Settings and check the "Empty Trash on Exit" and the "Cleanup ('Expunge') Inbox on Exit" options. This makes Thunderbird work like an efficient cleaning service that empties your trash at the end of the day (or whenever you quit Thunderbird).

Delete or move the biggest messages
Rather than wasting your time deleting thousands of 4KB messages, you can free up the most space by moving/deleting just the few really large messages. To find which folder is using the most space, go to: IMAP space used by folders (https://sysnews.ncsu.edu/tools-bin/imap-usagequery). This page gives a report of how much each folder is using. Spend your time cleaning up the largest folder.

From within a folder (in Thunderbird) sort your messages by "Size" to get the largest messages together. Chances are real good that all of these messages have some large attachments.

Move messages to local folders
All messages in your unity mail Inbox and the folders that are sub-folders of your unity mail Inbox count towards your quota. Messages that are in your "Local Folders" do NOT count towards your quota. Move any folders/messages that you don't need access to from other computers or webmail to your Local Folders. The space for these is only limited by your computer's hard drive capacity.

References

Cleaning Up Your Mail When You Are Close To Quota

Changing Your ITD Account Quotas How to allocate more space to e-mail

IMAP Quota Check Find out how your e-mail quota is being allocated

For future reference, you can find these links on the NCCE Intranet -> IT Resources -> Email

Information presented here is provided as a general information resource. Any mention of commercial products is for information only; it does not imply recommendation, endorsement nor support by Extension IT.