Managing Your Email Storage – A Simple Guide
Over the years, the way we use email has changed dramatically. Attachments have become larger, businesses retain emails for longer and inboxes that once measured a few hundred megabytes can now grow to many gigabytes.
Whilst modern hosting platforms offer significantly more storage than they once did, email isn’t designed to be a permanent filing cabinet. Keeping unnecessarily large mailboxes can slow down searching, increase backup times and make restoring data more difficult if it’s ever required.
To help our clients keep their email accounts running efficiently, we’ve put together a few simple tips.
Think of Email as a Communication Tool
Your email account is primarily there to send and receive messages. Once an email has been dealt with, consider whether it still needs to remain in your live mailbox.
Old quotations, completed projects, newsletters and large attachments can often be archived or removed without affecting your day-to-day business.
Archive Older Emails
If there are emails you may need in the future but don’t access regularly, archiving them is often the best solution.
Most email applications allow you to store emails locally on your computer whilst removing them from the server. This reduces the amount of storage your mailbox uses without permanently deleting important correspondence.
Apple Mail
Apple Mail allows you to create local “On My Mac” mailboxes.
Messages can simply be dragged from your hosted mailbox into these local folders, where they remain available even though they no longer occupy server storage.
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook includes built-in archiving features that allow older emails to be stored on your computer in Outlook Data Files (PST files).
Archived emails remain searchable within Outlook but no longer consume space on your hosted mailbox.
Gmail
If you’re using Gmail as your email provider, it’s worth noting that Archiving does not reduce your storage usage. Archived emails are simply moved out of your inbox but continue to occupy space within your Google account.
To reduce storage in Gmail, emails or large attachments must be permanently deleted.
Remove Large Attachments
Attachments are often responsible for the majority of mailbox storage.
Many email applications allow you to sort messages by size, making it easy to identify emails containing large PDFs, photographs or other files that are no longer required.
Empty Deleted Items
Deleting an email doesn’t always free up space immediately.
Most email systems retain deleted messages in a Deleted Items or Trash folder until that folder is emptied.
Checking this folder regularly can often recover a surprising amount of storage.
Review Sent Items
Many people focus on their Inbox but forget about their Sent Items folder.
Large attachments sent to customers or colleagues are stored here too and can occupy just as much space as incoming emails.
Do You Need More Storage?
Every hosting account provided by Villages Web Design includes a generous standard email storage allowance.
If your business genuinely requires additional capacity, we can increase your available storage quickly and without affecting your existing email accounts.
We’re Happy to Help
If you’re unsure how much storage you’re currently using, would like advice on reducing mailbox size or need help archiving older emails, we’re always happy to assist.
Just get in touch with the Villages Web Design team and we’ll be pleased to point you in the right direction.
