Your mailbox is full – what can you do?

In the era before email became the thing, business executives would be assisted by secretaries, managing their correspondence and ensuring that everything was filed away safely.  As the manager, selected letters would be placed in your in-tray and you would be presented with a stack of documents typed up and ready to be signed which would then be whisked away to be posted.

Now email is the ubiquitous business communication tool, everyone is quick to dash off an email and copy in several recipients and the majority of businesspeople have to fend for themselves without the help of a personal assistant.

The result: it can be difficult to see the important messages among the general chatter and, before you know it, your inbox starts creaking at the seams.

Is a full mailbox a problem?  It’s not just an issue of overwhelm; once your email system is full to capacity, it won’t be possible to receive any new messages.  Think of a bucket full to the brim of water – no matter how hard you try, you cannot squeeze an extra drop into it.

Your mailbox is full – what can you do?

• Start managing your inbox: use that delete button! Get rid of all those superfluous messages, and remember to empty the deleted items folder too, otherwise they will continue to count towards your storage count.
• Remember your sent items too: also well worth having a prune!
• Unsubscribe: have you ended up on mailing lists? Will you ever find time to read the mailshots?  If the answer is NO, hit unsubscribe.
• Are you being spammed? A good spam filter will stop malicious or simply unsolicited emails from reaching your inbox.  If something questionable gets through the barrier, remember to blacklist it.
• Encourage your contacts to cut back: ask to be left off the CC list if it’s not necessary and pick up the phone instead of getting into an email conversation.
• Put rules in place: this may not reduce the size of your mailbox, but at least categories of messages are sorted into specific folders, enabling you to see and deal with those important missives.

Your housekeeping measures are exhausted – what now?

If you are using Microsoft 365, the standard mailbox size is 50GB.

Fortunately there are other subscriptions which will give you more elbow room:

• Exchange Online Plan 2 increases your mailbox to 100GB.
• Exchange Online Archiving does what it says on the tin – managing the archiving of your emails.

Do you need help with your emails?

Give Computer Troubleshooters a call, or drop us an email, and you will soon be on the right subscription for your business.