Thursday, August 18, 2011

Personal Mailbox Maintenance

Someone asked recently how to manage their mailbox.  Great question and not an easy answer.  How you manage folders, labels, etc. is highly personal and there's a ton of information on the Internet.

What I was able to provide were some tips on keeping the mailbox size manageable as well as minimizing clutter.  Here's what I recommended.

Make a conscious effort to manually delete items that are either part of a thread (keep just the most recent item if the text exists throughout the chain of mails), delete anything with large attachments unless you positively need to have the attachments in the e-mail (it's better to save them to the file server).  Personal messages with attachments I forward to my personal e-mail.  Doing those things will keep the mailbox slim.  Then, scan sent items for ones that can be deleted, and finally, empty the deleted items on a regular basis.

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