Overview

All faculty, staff, and student mailboxes at UNBC will be limited with a mailbox quota in order to provide you with better service and system performance. ITS has established a number of thresholds to advise users when they are reaching their storage limitations and encourage a proactive approach to managing personal email.

Related Topics:
Quota Limits
Checking Folder Size
Recommendations for Managing Quota

Quota Limits

  

User Group	Quota	Warning
Faculty	200MB	180MB
Staff	200MB	180MB
Students	100MB	80MB

The quotas work as follows:

1. The Exchange System automatically keeps track of your quota usage.
2. When your mailbox reaches the warning limit, the system will send you an automated daily warning with a request to clean up your mailbox. The following is a similar email message that you will receive:
   
   From: System Administrator
   To: <your username>
   Subject: Your mailbox is over its size limit
   

   ---

   Your mailbox has exceeded one or more size limits set by your administrator.
   Your mailbox size is 192943 KB.
   Mailbox size limits:
    You will receive a warning when your mailbox reaches 190000 KB.You may not be able to send or receive new mail until you reduce your mailbox size. To make more space available, delete any items that you are no longer using or move them to your personal folder file (.pst).  Items in all of your mailbox folders including the Deleted Items and Sent Items folders count against your size limit.  You must empty the Deleted Items folder after deleting items or the space will not be freed.
   See client Help for more information. 
   
   
   
3. When your mailbox reaches your quota, you will not be able to send messages, but will be able to receive messages.
4. At this time you will have to perform some housekeeping on your mailbox. Methods for cleaning up your mailbox include: removing messages that are no longer required; Cleaning up your Sent Items and Deleted Items folders; and Auto Archiving.
5. Your ability to send mail will be suspended until you are within your quota.
   

Check Folder Size

When you have reached your quota warning, you will be sent an automated message that will alert you of the problem. At this point you need to determine where your data is and how much space it is taking up.  

For a pdf version of these instructions, click here

Recommendations for Managing Quota

There are several methods for managing your mailbox to ensure that you stay within your quota. The first method is to cleanup your Sent Items and Deleted Items folders by deleting message that are no longer required. This however may not be the best method if you are required to keep your correspondence for a long time. The second method is to setup Auto Archiving. The instructions can be found here: Microsoft Outlook Auto Archiving.

The Third method is to remove attachments that are no longer needed from messages. Removing attachments can be done as follows:

1. If you want to keep a copy for the attached file
   1. Open the message, right -click on the attachment and select Save-As.
      
   2. Next, choose a location for the file (probably your home directory) and click Save.
   3. Now you can either delete the attachment or remove the entire mail message
2. If you want to delete the attachment but keep the email
   1. Open the message, right-click on the attachment and select Remove
      
   2. Close the message and click Yes to saving the changes. This keeps the message ion tact but removes the attachment from the message and decreases your quota.
3. If you want to delete both the attachment and the message
   1. Delete the mail message as you normally would.