e-mail this page
Printer Friendly Version

Campus starts “clean out your inbox” campaign

Spring is here, and with help from the campus community Sacramento State will do some cleaning. Brooms and mops won’t be needed though; just the delete button on the computer.

The University wants to reduce the amount of clutter on servers that handle e-mail traffic to and from campus. Faculty and staff send and receive more than 200,000 e-mails daily. Those bytes of information take up space on servers, and when they fill up, more space has to be purchased.

“Let’s say one person sends a 1-megabyte document to 10 people on campus and those people send it to 10 more people. That’s 101 megs just like that,” says Lucinda Parker, IRT project and policy manager. “It may not seem like much individually, but multiply that by more than 40,000 people on campus sending thousands of documents, and you see how our servers can fill up fast.”

Faculty and staff e-mail take up more than a terabyte (that’s 1,000 gigabytes) of space on servers in the Academic Information Research Center and more on other e-mail servers across campus.

“People probably assume work e-mail is automatically saved on their computer’s hard drive,” Parker says. “But, since our e-mail is networked, that’s not the case.”

Many faculty and staff members are at, or nearing their mailbox limit of one gigabyte, and could have their accounts temporarily frozen.

One of the quickest and easiest ways to restore space is to delete sent mail from Microsoft Outlook e-mail “Sent Item” folder.

“If you look at the lower left-hand corner when you click ‘Sent Items,’ it tells you how many sent files you have in your account,” Parker says, adding that some total in the thousands. “There is very little reason for someone to keep mail that they’ve sent since it’s just a copy of something they already have.”

Deleting sent e-mail is simple and can typically be done in less than five minutes, she says. “Microsoft Outlook keeps sent e-mail in a folder called ‘Sent Items.’ To delete, simply highlight old items in the ‘Sent Items’ folder and click the ‘Delete’ button.”

People can also set up their Outlook accounts so that sent mail is not saved. To do so, find “Tools” at the top of the Outlook page. Click it and scroll down to “Options.” Under the “Preferences” tab on the box that opens, click “E-mail options.” On that page, unmark “Save copies of messages in Sent Item folder.” Hit “OK” and “OK.”

Parker said IRT will set up training sessions and provide other assistance to help the campus community with the clean up.  

For more information, or assistance, contact the Service Desk at 278-7337 or Parker at 278-7727.