Rob's Rants

Typical Inbox

I used to work for a networking company that employed 4800 people at its peak. Because we made networking gear, we had a great network and almost everyone had e-mail, long before e-mail was common. By the time I left 9 years later we had 700 employees. So needless to say, storage capacity wasn’t a big issue — a lot of space had been freed up. Therefore I went most of my corporate life never worrying for a second how full my inbox was, other than to help with organization. It wasn’t uncommon at this company to see people with eight, nine, or even ten years of e-mail in their inbox, with all attachments included. 20 revisions of the same slide deck? No problem. I routinely saw colleagues with inboxes in the hundreds of Megabyte range, several in the Gigabyte range, and one or two approaching tens of Gigabytes! Now, I never let mine get that bad, mostly because I actually wanted to find things and Outlook search didn’t actually get useful until Outlook 2007 was released. So I did use auto-archiving, etc. But I really never paid that much attention to it.

So imagine my culture shock when I discovered after my first week at my new job that inbox size limits were strictly enforced at 10 MB. At 10.01 MB they simply stopped delivering the mail and you couldn’t send anything either. What would I do?

Turns out that most of my colleagues had just resigned themselves to deleting stuff and hoping they never needed it again. I didn’t find that an acceptable solution. But I did find some tips and technology that would help. Here’s my system:

1. Find a place to archive e-mail. Preferably on a network drive. If you don’t have a network home drive, ask someone at the Helpdesk or in IT. Because everyone has a network home space — most people just don’t use it. Using a network location for your archives has several advantages. Among them: it can be accessible from more than one computer, and the network administrators will back it up for you. Trust me, your IT People will love it if you use your network drive. Because it prevents them from ever having to have the “Sorry, if you didn’t back it up its lost forever,” discussion with you when your hard drive crashes.
2. Set up an aggressive Auto Archive routine in Outlook. I set mine to run every 7 days and move any mail older than 14 days to the archive.
3. Handle large attachments. Email is small. What kills an inbox is large attachments. Like screenshots from people who hit the Print Screen key and send the raw bitmap file. How do you handle attachments? With Attachment Save from Sperry Software. This is a brilliant little Outlook Add-in which can be configured to automatically strip attachments out of incoming and outgoing messages and save them to a directory on your hard drive or on a mapped network drive. The attachment is replaced with a hyperlink in the e-mail so you can just click to open it. And it’s smart enough so that if you forward a message that had the attachment stripped, it will put it back before sending the forward. Absolutely brilliant. I’ve been running it for a year and haven’t had a single issue.
4. Delete the junk. Get serious about what you keep. Almost everything you receive can be deleted once you’ve taken action on it. Get in the habit of using the delete key.

Using this simple four-point plan I’ve been able to stay ahead of my inbox for an entire year and haven’t lost a thing. Give it a try — you’ll be the envy of your office.

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