Email Mailbox Hygiene

Most companies have limits on e-mail storage to manage corporate risk and optimize the locating of critical correspondence.  Large mailbox sizes also degrade a workstation’s email, calendar and contact system performance.  Thus, appropriate e-mail storage hygiene practices are required of ENPOINTE employees.

ENPOINTE Practices

• All ENPOINTE job-related data files are backed up and retained for only one year beyond invoicing date.  This commitment to purge data files is made to all of ENPOINTE’s clients.
• Job-related client data files should not be retained in e-mails.
• Incoming client files for conventional jobs should be sent directly to CSRs via SFTP for our most efficient workflows.
• Retention of e-mail attachments creates storage problems in our e-mail system.

Organizing Your Emails

• To understand the storage size of your mailbox and which folders are taking up the most storage space, go to the File tab on the top of your Outlook. Through the info panel, select Tools and a dropdown menu will appear, select Mailbox Cleanup.  This will prompt a pop-up menu for you to select View Mailbox Size.  After a brief wait, this will show your subfolder storage sizes (in kb).
• To delete emails, go to the folder which you want to clean up. Within any folder you can sort e-mails by the column headers:
• By clicking on the “Size” column header, you can sort to put the largest on top.
  (Click again to sort the largest to the bottom.)

• By clicking on the “Received” column header, you can sort to the oldest on top.
  (Click again to sort the oldest on the bottom.)

How to Select Groups of Emails for Deletion

There are several tactics to use in deleting e-mails.  One tactic is deleting e-mails by age and getting rid of your oldest e-mails.  Another tactic is focusing on the messages with the largest attachments and deleting e-mails by size.

1. Select multiple individual e-mails by using the Ctrl + Click function.
2. Select a group of e-mail messages, from your first selection to your next by using the Shift + Click function.

Permanently Deleting Emails Can Be a One-Step or Two-Step Process

One-Step Process

After selecting a group of messages to delete, the one-Step process uses the (Shift + Delete) function on your keyboard.  This may prompt a pop-up window asking, “Are you sure you want to permanently delete the selected items?” or it may instantly delete all.

Two-Step Process

After selecting a group of messages to delete, the two-step process starts by right clicking on your selected e-mails and choosing Delete at the bottom of the dropdown menu.  This will send the selected e-mails to the Deleted Items folder.  You will then need to select and delete these same items from the Deleted Items folder in order to clear storage space.