Student E-mail
Managing your E-mail
Introduction
In using the e-mail system at Loughborough University, there are a number of things that you should do to make sure your use of e-mail does not cause problems for your fellow users. These things may be considered under a number of headings, which cover both technical and social matters, although these often overlap. The key thing to remember is that e-mail, like anything else, needs to be managed. Although the available filestore for storing e-mail is generous, it is not unlimited. We must therefore ask all users to keep their usage within reasonable limits.
Students: You may have been referred to this page by an e-mail sent by IT Services to warn you that your e-mail usage is falling outside reasonable bounds. Please read the relevant sections below and take the necessary action.
Total size of mailstore
The overall amount of disk space we have available for staff and students to store e-mail is limited, and even a small number of people using excessive amounts of disk space could mean that the available space fills up and no-one else can receive e-mail.
Students on taught courses - you should restrict your total mailstore on the central server to a maximum of 200Mbytes. Deliberate action on your part to deny service to others would be treated as a disciplinary matter under our acceptable use policy - see www.lboro.ac.uk/it/policies/loughborough-aup.html. If you receive an e-mail about your disk usage, it is important that you act on it.
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Students can check the total size of their mailstore https://student-webmail.lboro.ac.uk/cgi-bin/mydiskusage.pl.
How to keep your usage down
For most users, keeping your disk space usage down is just a matter of good housekeeping - i.e. deleting messages you no longer require. Files sent as attachment take up the most space, so be particularly careful to keep these no longer than you need them.
Every time you send a message a copy is automatically kept for you, so remember to delete items in your "Sent Items" folder as well as those in your "Inbox". If you are using Web mail (or IMP) you can access your Sent Items, and any other folders you have created, by using the pull down box in the top left hand corner.
If you have deleted all the files you do not need and still find it difficult to keep within the limits recommended, please contact your department IT staff or lecturer to discuss ways round the problem. For example, you could save large attachments on your local hard disk or U: drive. If you are an Outlook Express user, we do not recommend that you move messages to your "local folders", as this can cause problems.
Tidying E-mail with Outlook Express Movie
Size of inbox (megabytes and number of messages)
Because your inbox (incoming mail folder) is where messages are delivered to, it is opened and read much more frequently than other folders, and having a large inbox can consume processing power on the mail server and make the service slower for other users. Furthermore, if there is an interruption to service while your inbox is being read, it can get corrupted, and need to be restored from a backup. This is much more likely to happen if your inbox is large. It is therefore in your interests as well as everyone else's to keep your inbox small. You can create folders to save the messages you have already read but want to keep (see below).
You should keep no more than 250 messages in your inbox. You should also try to keep the overall size of the inbox (in Megabytes) down by being particularly careful to delete, or move to other folders, any messages which have attachments.
You can check the total number of messages that you have in your Inbox (or any other folder) by:
In Outlook Express:
Right-clicking the Inbox folder (or any other folder) in the folders pane, selecting "Properties" from the pop-up menu. The "General" tab will tell you the number of messages (and how many are unread); the "Local File" tab will tell you the total file size (and wasted space on the local file copy - to reduce this click the "Compact" button.
In IMP:
Log in to your Inbox (or change to another folder). Ensure that you are on the last page (2 of 2, 12 of 12, 99 of 99 or whatever) - if not, click on the double chevron >>. The total number of messages is displayed to the top right.
Individual Very Large Attachments
Please be especially aware of any e-mails you send or receive that have very large files attached, i.e. anything approaching or greater than 1 Mbyte, and be especially careful to delete these if not required.
To scan your emails to look for the big attachments:
In Outlook Express:
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From the menu select View and then Columns.
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Tick size.
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You can use the "Move up" (and "Move Down") button to determine where the column appears.
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This adds a size column to your display and you can click on the column heading in the usual way to sort by size.
In IMP:
Click on the "Size" column heading / hyperlink to sort by size.
Personal Use of E-mail
Your Loughborough University e-mail account is provided for you to pursue your work or study. Personal use is permitted as a privilege, not a right. If your personal use is frequent or consumes a large amount of disk space you should consider setting up a personal e-mail account. Free e-mail providers are now readily available. We have for instance seen examples where staff or students have signed on to an e-mail newsletter service where a large attachment is sent to them daily, and the disk space used can build up quickly.
Purge deleted messages
Please purge deleted messages from each folder regularly. In Outlook Express: select your folder, and from the menu select Edit and then Purge Deleted Messages. In IMP: select your folder and click on the Expunge link. . It makes it easier to remember to do this if you leave your deleted messages showing rather than hiding them. From the menu select View then Current View and tick Show Deleted Messages.
Clear out your drafts
If you use Outlook Express, check your "drafts" folder and delete regularly, especially if you have saved your drafts with attachments.
Size of other folders
You should keep your e-mail organised by dividing it up into appropriate folders and sub-folders, e.g. by topic or date received (see the E-mail Guide (restricted)), so that it is straightforward to manage. Any one folder should be kept within a sensible size and should be no larger than 200 - 300 messages.
How you design your folders is up to you - like any filing system it will depend on the type of work that you do. You may wish to set up folders for projects or research topics. You may wish to set up one or more "contractual" folders where you store orders etc. and only delete these messages when the relevant contract is completed. You may wish to set up "temporary" folders where you store messages you wish to keep for a short period of time, but not long term.
Collaborative Working, Distributing Documents
When you send documents to other people as attachments, and if your e-mail is set up to save a copy of stored messages, you will be storing a copy of the file in your e-mail disk space as well as its original location, so remember to delete these sent messages if you don't need them. If you need to send the attachment to several people, and do wish to keep a copy of the sent mail, send it to all the recipients in the same e-mail, rather than as separate e-mails, as this will store only one copy of the attachment in your sent mail folder (or outbox).
Sending an attachment, such as a Word or PowerPoint file, to a large number of other users causes the file to be saved in each person's e-mail disk space. If you need to do this frequently, or if you need to send a file to large number of University staff or students at once, you could perhaps investigate other ways of working. Staff can use the Learn server (restricted) to distribute material to students. Staff can use the Intranet (restricted) to set up department shared areas and collaborative working areas. Student and staff group disk space areas can also be set up. Please see your department IT staff for assistance. We have a mass E-mail policy, which describes the policies and procedures for sending e-mails to many people.
Forgetting about Filtered Mail
Filters are very useful for helping you manage your e-mail However we do come across instances where a member of staff filters mail into a folder to read later, and never gets round to reading and hence deleting it. This can arise, for instance, if you filter the mail from a busy list or a regular news bulletin. Please check regularly any folders into which you filter mail, and remember to delete e-mail you do not need to store. Many lists, such as those on JISCmail, have list archives if you want to refer back.