What do you do with old emails? What does a business do with emails from ex-employees? Emails are a very important part of the communications of a business and may need to be retained for compliance reasons. However, does your business have a policy and procedure for what to do?
When it comes to managing your own personal emails, how do you handle that? Do you have a process or do you simply allow them to accumulate? Like any data, best practice would be to create some archiving facility.
What you may not be aware of is that Outlook already has a built in archiving process that you can take advantage of. In most cases it is disabled but it is simple enough. Just right mouse click on your inbox for example and select Properties from the menu that appears. In the dialog box that now appears you will see an AutoArchive tab.
By default, the option will be set to not archive items. You can change that to either take settings from the default settings (normally set on the Exchange server) or you can configure your own settings. If you elect to use your own settings then, by default, items that are older than 6 months will be moved to an archive folder.
You can select from a number of different options when it comes to archiving and importantly you can enforce these settings from the server for all users. It is very important that your organization does have an archiving policy to handle the growth of emails over time. Working with mailboxes full of emails can be extremely hard and extends the amount of time required to do any sort of maintenance.
The issues around size of email is normally related to attachments. Restrictions can also be applied here if required to keep this in check. You can for example limit how large user attachments are as well as limiting the amount of space a users mailbox can consume.
It is important that you don’t allow your email systems to grow out of control to the point where they become to difficult and cumbersome to maintain. This means that you need to put policies in place to provide this control and this is certainly something Correct Solutions can assist with so contact us for more information.
