Keep your email slim and nimble

Your email – for some it’s neat and tidy with not much to see. For others, it’s a chance to hoard everything – including when someone emailed everyone about having a hot sandwich on a Friday morning in 2005. For everyone else, it’s somewhere in the middle.

The number of emails and actual storage space are two different things (but often linked). If you’re just keeping thousands of conversational emails, they probably don’t take up much storage space, if there are no attachments. On the flip side, if you’re regularly sending and receiving artwork for example, you’re probably taking up a lot of storage space.

Both scenarios will cause you a problem – one with housekeeping, and one with reliability, with the focus of this article being the latter.

The more email you hold on to, generally, the more problems you will have. In very general terms, once a mailbox is taking up more than around 20GB of storage space, you begin to see problems with opening Outlook, searching for emails and general performance-related problems. 

If you access multiple mailboxes, such as generic ones like sales@ for example, this problem then becomes magnified if you’re also synchronising the emails coming into that mailbox to your computer as well.

Now, whilst there are technical things that will help, such as using higher spec computers, or making configuration changes in Outlook – that’s not addressing the actual problem. The actual problem is – do you really need to store that many emails? Why? If you do need to store them for a legitimate reason, is there a better way of handling and storing them emails (for example an archive of some description)?

Trying to keep your email as clutter-free as possible, will help in the long term with both organisation and staying clear of technical problems interrupting your day. Perhaps you don’t need every email you’ve ever deleted clinging on for dear life in the Deleted Items folder? Do you need everything you’ve sent out which is older than twelve months? Is most of it irrelevant and can be archived? Perhaps the weekly emails for the Friday breakfast order really don’t need to be retained?

Long term, it’s just not sustainable to retain a vast volume of emails.

You should make a habit of regularly pruning your emails, trimming them down and give yourself a pat on the back for doing so. 

Gavin Moorhouse is the owner of Lucid Computer Solutions, an Office 365 Service Provider based in Worcestershire. Like his email, Gavin is also slim and nimble (well, likes to think he is).