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 which:

At the same time, campus e-mail service is a shared resource, and the system will be of the most use and of greatest availability to everyone if each of us practices five basic e-mail management principles:

  1. Delete messages you no longer need.
  2. Empty the trash.
  3. Filter your e-mail to get rid of junk.
  4. Detach attachments.
  5. Watch your quota.

Delete messages you no longer need

This seems obvious, but it is often overlooked. Are unneeded copies of messages you sent still stored in your Inbox or Sent folders? Are you saving messages as a form of "to-do" list, and those tasks are now accomplished? Do you have messages with large attachments which could be deleted? ...Please be sure to delete all messages and attachments which are no longer needed.

Empty the trash

When you delete an e-mail message, by default it is moved to your Deleted Items 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 Deleted Items folder take up quota just as unread or saved messages do. Therefore, you should empty this folder every time you use mail. In Webmail, right click on the Deleted Items folder and select Empty Deleted Items.

Filter your e-mail to get rid of junk

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 E-Mail folder periodically in case something important was incorrectly classified as spam. (It rarely happens, but Murphy's Law still applies.) Then you should empty the Junk E-Mail folder often so your account has plenty of room for the e-mail you want to receive. In Webmail, right click on the Junk E-Mail folder and select Empty Junk E-Mail.

Detach attachments

Even though it is easy to share pictures, audio files, video, and documents via e-mail, messages with 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-resolution picture files and the message can grow to over 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.

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.

Watch your quota

Every Lawrence e-mail user has at least 100MB of storage for their e-mail account. When the amount of storage you are using reaches 85% of your account quota, you'll see a pop-up message bringing this to your attention.

You can, and should, monitor your own e-mail storage usage from time to time rather than waiting for the pop-up warning.

What should you do if you receive a pop-up warning or discover through your own monitoring that you are approaching your quota limit? Most of the time, you can recover a lot of space by following the suggestions above:

If, after doing all of the above, you still cannot free up enough of your quota, contact the Helpdesk for further assistance.