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TIP 2: Remove attachments to your emails

Although email attachments are a valuable facility, they have the tendency to rapidly consume large portions of a user's mailbox quota!

Attachment Saving

It is often a good idea to save an attachment to your local machine and delete the original attachment (or entire email) from the email to free up the space in your mailbox.

Steps in Outlook

  1. open the email and select File, Save attachments
  2. select a location and name (if you want to change it) for the attachment
  3. click Save
  4. the email can then be deleted from your Inbox if it is no longer required.

Steps in web email(Outlook Web Access)

  1. right-click on the attachment icon within the email
  2. if you are using Internet Explorer, select Save Target As... from the menu
  3. If you are using Netscape, select Save Link As... from the menu
  4. you will then be prompted for the disk drive, folder, File name and Save as type: (ie the file type).

Locate large attachments

You can sort emails by size to identify those that are of excessive size. You can then determine whether you wish to keep them or delete them!

Sort email by size

To sort emails in a particular folder, select the required folder in the Folder List:

  1. right-click Size on the heading line

  2. choose Sort descending

  3. check all large emails and delete, archive or save attachments.

If the Size column does not show in your Inbox

Outlook 2000 & Outlook 2002

  1. on the View menu, point to Current View, and then click Customize Current View
  2. click Fields
  3. add a field or column
  4. in the Available fields box, click Size
  5. click Add.

Outlook 2003

  1. on the View menu, point to Arrange By, point to Current View, and then click Customize Current View
  2. click Fields
  3. under the Available Fields, select the Size column and click Add.

Sending large messages

Attachments can be quite large, so if you are attaching a document, it may be a good idea to see how much space a message is taking up before you send it.

  1. select File, Save while editing your message
  2. switch to the Drafts folder and view the size of the document.

Adding images to an email can consume quite a bit of space, so try inserting a reference to the picture instead!

  1. select Insert, Picture
  2. paste the web address of the picture into Picture Source.

Tips for Managing Your Mailbox

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