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Email Best Practices

By: Polemarchus

How important is it keeping your email inbox below quota?  How about helping others keep their inboxes under quota? There are several simple things you can do to accomplish this for you as well as for others.

  1. Keep a separate account for personal email.
  2. When replying to an email containing an attachment use the option to “reply without attachment(s)” when possible.
  3. When receiving an email that contains an attachment, usually there is no need to keep the attachment in your email box.  You can save the attachment to your computer or a network drive then delete (detach) it from the email message.  Doing so reduces the size of your email box and keeps your files manageable.  If you are a Lotus Notes user, you can do this by right clicking on the attachment and choosing “Save and Delete …”
  4. Avoid sending messages to multi-user groups when the intended audience only includes a few members of the group.
  5. When a message has been sent to a group of people and you need to reply only to the sender, use the “Reply” button instead of the “Reply to All.” 
  6. Avoid sending messages with long histories unless absolutely necessary.  If questions are being asked back and forth, sometimes it is easier to make a phone call.
  7. Let chain email messages end with you.  Some of your contacts may actually thank you.
  8. If your inbox is too large, time to cleanup.  You will be surprised how many messages from years ago you do not need.
  9. Create folders to organize your messages.
  10. Create filters for spam or regularly received messages and check the contents regularly to delete messages you do not need.
  11. Clean up your sent folder.  Remember in Lotus Notes, by default, a copy of every message you send is kept in the sent folder.  If you send a lot of attachments, your sent folder size increases rapidly.
  12. If your inbox has become too large and takes a long time to load think about setting up a yearly archive.  This way you keep your messages accessible and your inbox will load faster.

For assistance with any of the aforementioned items, you may contact the ITS Desktop Support group at 5-8344.