Best Practices for Email Cleanup

Are you experiencing slow response time from your email? Here are a few steps to follow on a regular basis to maintain a clean and functioning email account.

• Empty the Deleted Items folder. Your deleted items folder should be emptied frequently to ensure you aren’t keeping messages you don’t need. Some emails you have deleted may contain large files that are taking up space.
• Empty the Junk Email folder. Periodically empty this folder to save your Inbox space for messages you actually want.
• Empty the Sent Items folder. This folder is frequently overlooked and, in most cases, contains the largest amount of data which can bog down email system performance.
• Don’t copy yourself when sending or forwarding emails. Copying yourself creates duplicate emails in your Inbox and Sent folders. Simply move (click and drag or cut and paste) the email you sent from your Sent folder to your Inbox folder.
• Unsubscribe from periodicals you no longer read. If you signed up for newsletters from reputable sites, but no longer read their correspondence, then unsubscribe from them. All major websites will offer an unsubscribe option at the very bottom of every email they send.
• Don’t email large files to others within your organization. Save the file on your network and email the location of the file to the recipient.
• Delete Attachments in emails. If the body of the email is still needed bu the attachment isn’t, simply right click on the attachment in the email and select Remove Attachment in the drop-down menu.  If you need to reference the attachment at a later date, save it to your network and then remove it from the email.
• DO NOT Archive emails. Archived emails are not backed up.