Best Practices to Keep Email Storage Low

Tags storage Email

Purpose

UTD email accounts offer 99 GB of storage space for personal accounts and 50 GB for shared mailboxes. There are several methods to help keep your email storage low. This article covers checking storage space and best practices to minimize the storage space used in your UTD email account.

Note: This article mainly refers to the Outlook desktop application. Steps may vary slightly if you are using Outlook in the browser or the new version of Outlook.  

Video Tutorial

Details

Checking Email Storage

  1. Open Outlook and select the File tab.

 

  1. Next to the "Mailbox Settings" header, you may preview the size of your mailbox.

 

  1. If you see your account is nearly full, you may follow a few steps in the following articles to clear storage space: Storage Articles. 

Share Files as a Link Using OneDrive

Sharing files through a link ensures your email account is not overloaded with large files. In addition, when files are updated, those changes are live in the online versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel so users do not have to send a new sharing link when revisions are made.  

Documents shared via OneDrive can be sent to internal or external individuals by selecting the share setting. As a best practice, you should avoid ever adding an attachment to an email, and instead use a link to share files. You can find more details on how to use OneDrive here.

Review Messages

As a best practice, it is recommended to review your entire inbox every six months and clear out old messages. Review each folder and remove messages that are no longer relevant by permanently deleting them. By permanently deleting files from your Junk, Sent, and Deleted folders, you can clear your storage space.

Create Rule to Delete Old Emails

Using the web version of Outlook, you can set a retention policy to automatically delete a specific email after a selected time period. This saves you from having to manually delete old messages and ensures your email inbox is routinely cleaned to reduce total storage used.

  1. Log into Office.com and select Outlook. Makw sure Home is selected.
  2. From the top ribbon, select Assign Policy.
  3. From the drop-down, select the last option: More Retention Policies.

  1. From the "Settings" pop out box, select the Add new policy option.

Outlook Online retention policy page

  1. Select the policy you would like to be able to apply.

Retention policy options

  1. After going back to your initial message, open the Assign Policy drop-down and select the new retention policy.
    • You can also apply this policy to a folder by right-clicking the folder, selecting Assign policy, and selecting the desired policy.

Don't Use Inbox as File Storage

Your inbox should be utilized as a communication tool, but is not designed to store and locate large files or attachments. OneDrive offers larger file storage and sharing files as a link prevents inboxes from being overloaded- which affects both your inbox and those who receive your messages. Images, PDFs and music files generally are larger files that can clog inboxes.

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