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Bradley W Becker/FACSTAFF/UNO/UNEBR
03/14/2006 11:20 AM





Subject:
Reclaim Mail Space in Lotus Notes

Category:
Lotus Notes
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Bradley W Becker/FACSTAFF/UNO/UNEBRType of review:
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There are several steps you can take to understand just how much space you are using in your mailbox, and to then reduce the size of your mail file. This will prevent Quota Warning messages and improve performance of your Lotus Notes account.

1. Know how much space you are using
2. Concentrate on large-sized e-mails
3. Archive (client only)
4. Watch the attachments
5. Check ALL your folders (including the Trash)

















1. Know how much space you are using.
If you are using myMail...
Once you are logged into myMail, click on the Mail File bar graph at the top of the screen, in the center:


A pop-up window will appear. It should look something like this:



What you want to keep an eye on is the space used. Warnings are issued at 90 MB for Students/Sponsored Guests, and 720 MB for Faculty/Staff. Service is shut off at the quota limit, which is 100 MB for Students/Sponsored Guests, and 800 MB for Faculty Staff.
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2. Concentrate on the Emails with Large Attachments
Often, a few e-mail messages with large files attachments can consume most of your e-mail account storage space. In the Lotus Notes Client, as well as on myMail, you are able to sort your mail to show the largest space-consuming e-mails first. This will allow you to see if any messages might be taking up a lot of space. Under the row of information header buttons in your mail file, click on the 'Size' header to perform this sort. Click it once to bring the largest emails to the top, click it again to reverse the sort. You may need to scroll up or down to see the largest messages after clicking on the 'Size' header. The numbers that are displayed in the Size column is the number of bytes in the message. The larger the number the more space the message and its attachment(s) consume. You can delete the message, or, open it and double-click on the body of the message to edit it. Click once on the attachment and then the 'delete' key to remove the attachment but keep the other information in the message. Alternatively, you could also save off the attachment to your computer desktop or other location outside of Notes. (see #4 below). In case you were wondering, there are 1,048,576 bytes in 1 MB.

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3. Archiving (Client Only)
If you use the Lotus Notes Client to access your Mail, you can archive emails to your local computer, which will prevent you from deleting any email. This will remove the email from the server and place it on your local computer. For more instructions on how to do this, please go to https://unomail2.unomaha.edu/databases/ITS/ITS_KB_Public.nsf/bf25ab0f47ba5dd785256499006b15a4/a70dfbb375a8c5f386256d650061e8f6?OpenDocument

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4. Watch the Attachments
As you might have noticed, most of the larger emails that you have contain attachments. If the attachment is very large, AND you want to keep it, it might be best to download the attachment to your local computer rather than have it reside in your email.

If you are using the Lotus Notes Client...
Double click on the attachment you wish to download to your computer. A window that looks similar to this will appear:

Click on the "Save..." button and choose a place on your local computer to save the attachment.

After you have saved the attachment, you have several different options. You can choose to delete the email entirely, or you can just delete the attachment. To delete the attachment, click the Delete button on the Attachment window that pops up when you double click the attachment. You will be asked to confirm what you are doing because it cannot be undone later.
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5. Check all your Folders
All the contents of every folder in your Mail file (except All Documents, see below!) count toward your quota. So, you should check every single folder to make sure that you do not have any large repositories of information. One common place that can become quite large quickly is the Sent folder. By default, Lotus Notes keeps a copy of every single message that you send. You can change this setting by using the following steps:

If you are using the Lotus Notes Client...
Go to the User Preferences window (Windows: File Menu -> Preferences -> User Preferences; Mac: Notes Menu -> Preferences -> User Preferences) and click on the Mail tab. Look for heading in the middle of the window that has Sending.

You can select different options for what to do with sent mail underneath "Save mail that you send." We recommend that you use 'Always Prompt' so that the email client will ask you every time you send a message if you want to keep a copy of it. If you know you will never need a copy of what you sent, you can choose 'Don't keep a copy'. Click OK at the bottom of this window to save your changes and go back to your Mail file.

Another place that becomes troublesome is the Trash folder. Items that you chose to delete are moved to the Trash folder and are stored there for a period of time (typically 2 days) before they are removed from your Mail file. Check this folder and delete the contents of it by hand if you are getting close to being over quota. You can do this by clicking the Empty Trash button inside the Trash folder.

One folder we do NOT recommend you delete from is the All Documents folder in the Views folder. At first look, it may seem like there is an extra copy of everything that you have. However, these ARE the files that you already have, just displayed in a different way. In other words, if you delete an item out of the All Documents folder, you will delete it out of your other folders as well.

Another thing to keep in mind - do you *really* need to keep a copy of every message you send? If not, change your mail preferences for "Keep a copy of everything I send" to be 'ask me' for each one. Then you can decide whether or not it's worth cluttering your mail file with messages you send.

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Anytime you take actions to clean up your Mail file, it will take approximately 24 hours before the changes will be reflected on the server. Once this period has past, if you had received any quota warning messages previously, you should be back to full email functionality!

As always, if you have any questions about this, please feel free to call ITS Customer Services at 554-HELP (4357)



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