Managing your FLCC Exchange mailbox size

 

Overview

Each Exchange mailbox at FLCC has an overall size limit. All mailboxes receive these warning messages when approaching their size limit:

When you reach 85% of your quota, you will receive warning messages from the System administrator with the subject line: “Your mailbox is over its size limit”

 

When you reach 95% of your quota, you will be prohibited from sending e-mail messages, and you will receive a warning message from the System Administrator with the subject line: “Your mailbox is closed”

 

When you reach 100% of your quota, you will be prohibited from receiving e-mail messages (will be bounced back to the user who sent it), and you will receive a warning message from the System Administrator with the subject line: “Your mailbox is closed”

 

The warning message will also indicate the current size limit of the mailbox. The limit for most is 275MB, with warnings starting at 233MB.

 

Your response in all 3 of these cases needs to be to reduce the size of your Exchange mailbox. Outlook 200x users and Outlook Web Access users have different procedures for doing this. Separate instructions for each are listed below:

 

Outlook 200x Users

1) Move any items you want to save from the Deleted Items folder to other folders. (for help, search Outlook help for “Create a folder” and “Move an item into another folder”)

 

2) Right click on Deleted Items in the "All Folders" list and click Empty Deleted Items Folder

 

3) Check your mailbox size

-         click Tools and click Mailbox cleanup (you may have to click the double arrow at the bottom of the tools menu to see “Mailbox Cleanup”)

-         click the button to see the size of your mailbox

 

4) Make a note of your individual folders that hold the most data

 

5) Close the Folder size and Mailbox Cleanup windows

 

6) Open the folders that hold the most data, and delete items that you don’t want to save.

*Tip- Start with your Sent Items folder. Messages with attachments typically are much larger in size than messages without attachments. Select all of the items with attachments that you don’t need anymore in the index by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking once on each one. When you are done selecting, right click anywhere on the blue selected area, and click Delete

 

7) Return to step two and repeat the process until you have freed up enough space.

 

Additional information

Once you have freed up some space, you can change the settings on Outlook 200x so that your Deleted Items folder is purged each time that you exit:

Open Outlook 200x. Click Tools, Options, and click the Other tab. Check the box next to Empty the deleted items folder upon exiting.

It also can be very helpful for you to set up Outlook so that it displays the size of each message as they arrive. In Outlook 2003, you can see these sizes if you place the reading pane on the bottom or turn it off. To do that, click View, Reading Pane, and click Bottom or Off.  If you have Outlook XP you can configure this for your inbox (or any other target folder) by doing the following:

• Open the target folder
• Right-click the "From" field in the index fields bar
• Select "Field Chooser" from the pop-up menu
• Find the "Size" field in the field chooser window
• Left-click, hold, and drag the Size field into the index fields bar to the right of the paper clip
• Close the field chooser window

If you find that you cannot free up enough space by deleting items, you can archive the items that you don’t readily need. For instructions on how to do this, see http://paws.flcc.edu/~taylorjm/archive.htm .

 

 

Outlook Web Access Users

1)      Log into OWA

2)      Highlight each message in your inbox that you do not want to save, and click the Delete button on the toolbar (looks like a big "X"). To select a range of messages in a row for deletion, highlight the first

         one, hold down the shift key, and highlight the last one – and then click the Delete button. You can also pick and choose messages by holding down the shift key while selecting each message individually

         before clicking delete. Pay special attention to messages with attachments since they are typically larger in size.

          Note: if you want to make all of your attachments appear in a group at the top: click the paper clip in the index, and then type a “1” in the “Items:” box in the top right corner and press enter.

3)      Click the folder button on the top of the Outlook bar, and select the Sent Items folder  

4)      Repeat step 2 for the Sent Items folder and other folders you may have items in.

5)      Empty the Deleted Items folder by clicking the “Empty Deleted Items folder” icon at the top of the page (looks like a wastebasket).