Email Management

After you have your new email settings in place and are able to send and receive successfully, you'll need to consider how you will be using and managing your email messages.

-- DEFAULT ALLOTMENT OF SPACE ON SERVER FOR EMAIL MESSAGES --

The default setting for email quota on most servers is 10M. This is generally more than most people need.

If you regularly send and receive messages with attachments that are graphic related or otherwise large, contact your hosting provider to raise the quota right away so that your correspondent doesn't have their message bounced back to them.


-- MANAGING EMAIL MESSAGES --

People (even me) reach a point in time where their email box is full. This happens when you keep email over a long duration of time in your email box. Maybe it's a note from a sweetie or a correspondence with a client containing important information, and our instincts are to save them. Whatever the case may be, they pile up after awhile.

To avoid this situation, I recommend routinely saving email you want to keep on your hard drive (rather than on the email server) and then delete it from your IN box. Again, your hosting provider can raise the quota; however, eventually, you will be inundated with email that it will become difficult to find messages and making it harder to manage your information. This is like leaving opened mail to pile up on the porch -- so much that you can no longer get in or out of the house.


-- ANOTHER WAY TO SAVE YOUR EMAIL --

When saving messages, I recommend saving the files as .HTM files or .TXT files since they tend to produce small file types in size. Also, you save yourself all of the extra steps involved in cutting and pasting your email text into word processing. You just "File > Save As", name the file and you're done. I prefer .HTM files because they retain their paragraph formatting and are easier to read when I open them later. They also can contain imagery.

-- FINDING EMAIL MESSAGES ON YOUR HARD DRIVE --

Some people keep email in their email box because they know that they can easily find or search for their messages, forgetting that you can do this just as easily in Windows Explorer:

• Right-click on the folder you suspect it's in. If you forget what folder, you can search "My Computer" to search all folders
  
• On the pop up menu, select "Search" or "Find."
  

• A dialog box will appear allowing you to specify characteristics of the email in various combinations: when you originally saved it, when you last updated it, what filename is, what kind of file it is, what words or names might be contained inside the file, etc. >>>>
  

You don't need to know the exact information about your email filename-- just specify the parts you know. For the parts you don't know, use an asterisk (*). Examples:

• Don't know the filename: >>> jenkins.*
• Don't know the spelling of a term: >>> ser*dipity.txt
  
• Don't know the spelling of a name (olsen or olson?): >>> ols*.htm

Neither do you need to know the exact date you created the file. You can search by a range.