Lawrence provides all students and employees with individual e-mail accounts for use in connection with their study or work at the college. In managing Lawrence's e-mail services, ITS aims to provide a system that:
At the same time, campus e-mail service is a shared resource, and the system will be of the most use and the greatest availability to everyone if each of us practices five basic e-mail management principles:
This seems obvious, but it is often overlooked. Are uneeded copies of messages you sent still stored in your Inbox or Sent folders? Are you saving messages as a kind of to-do list, and are those to-dos now done? Do you have messages with large attacthments, and could these attachments be saved and the messages deleted (see below)?
Tip: When using Mozilla Thunderbird on a PC, use the Shift+Delete keyboard shortcut to eliminate large messages directly.
Note: This option is not available on Macs.
By default, when you delete an e-mail message, it is moved to your Trash folder, where it will wait until the trash is emptied - just like at home! This approach gives you one last chance to retrieve a message you have accidentally deleted.
However, messages in the Trash folder take up quota the same as unread or saved messages. Therefore, you should empty the trash every time you use mail - see how to do it in:
Thunderbird | Mac Mail | WebMail
Even better, you can change your e-mail settings so that the trash is emptied automatically every time you exit your e-mail client. See how to do it in:
Thunderbird | Mac Mail | WebMail
The Lawrence e-mail system scans every piece of incoming mail and assigns it a spam score so you don't have to! With just a little bit of setup, you can move any e-mail with a high spam score to a special folder reserved for junk.
You can review the contents of the Junk folder periodically in case something important got classified as spam. (It rarely happens, but Murphy's Law still applies.)
Then you should empty the Junk folder - often - so your account has plenty of room for the e-mail you want to recieve!
See how to create a Junk folder for spam in:
Thunderbird | Mac Mail | WebMail
Once you see how reliable the spam filter is, you may want to set up your Junk folder so that it is emptied whenever you exit mail. See how to do it in:
Thunderbird | Mac Mail | WebMail
Even though it is easy to share picture, audio, video, and text files (such as Word or Excel documents) via e-mail, messages with such attachments can take a lot of space!
A typical text-format e-mail message takes only about 3.5 KB. Attach a Word or Excel document and the message can easily grow to 35 KB. Attach a PDF file and the message can grow to 350 KB. Attach just 3 high-res picture files and the message can grow to 3.5 MB. Audio and video clips can take up even more space!
One good way to save space in your e-mail account is to remove large attachments from your messages, saving them to your network space, for example. Detaching attachments will allow you to keep the messages themselves in your e-mail account without quota being used by the attachments.
See how to do it in:
Note: This option is not available on Macs.
Tip: Instead of e-mailing pictures to share them, try using a free on-line picture-sharing service like PhotoBucket, Shutterfly, or Snapfish. They make it easy to share pictures, give you control over who can see the pictures you upload, and, unlike the Lawrence mail server, they have lots of on-line storage available for free or at very low cost.
Every Lawrence e-mail user has at least 100MB of storage for their e-mail account (the account's 'quota'). When the amount of storage you're using reaches 85% of your account quota, you'll see a pop-up message bringing this to your attention.
Of course, it's better not to wait until the pop-up warning. You can, and should, monitor your own e-mail storage usage from time to time through Lawrence WebMail. See: Checking Your Quota
If you recieve a pop-up warning, or discover through your own monitoring, that you are approaching your quota limit, what should you do? Most of the time, you can recovor a lot of space by following the sugestions above:
If, after doing all of these, you still cannot free up enough of your quota, contact the Helpdesk (ext. 6570) for further assistance.