Email Performance – Are You Your Own Worst Enemy?
January 27th, 2012 by BrightCloud
Email is vital to your business and unfortunately it is often used as a “filing system”.
The more email grows the poorer the performance can be and ultimately may leading to a server crashing, which could be disruptive and potentially damaging to the business.
Given the opportunity, the size of any email system will continue to grow until something stops it. Without adequate controls this is usually a system crash caused by over-sized mail stores, running out of disk space or other calamitous events.
Email is often found at the core of business critical applications. Because of this, IT Departments have a duty of care to ensure that services are available and perform to expectations, but this duty of care also extends to the end-users of the system. Your organisation provides internal and external email services via Microsoft Exchange server. Larger organisations tend to:
- Provide larger systems with more resources
- Perform closer proactive management
- Impose stricter rules for email folder size
As mail stores grow they take longer to back up each night and consequently take very long to restore in the event of a problem. In the past, Bright Cloud has dealt with customers who have suffered major email outages and even lost some data because the mail store had been left to grow to an unmanageable level.
By re-organising mail stores and imposing limits, pro-active management ensures that the loss of a single server or store affects a limited number of end-users. Consequently, an element of control is required on the server side, to ensure that data is stored in the most efficient fashion, and from the end-user side we must make sure that the email system is used appropriately.
Once the number of emails that are stored in an individual folder exceeds a few thousand then Outlook can become very slow to respond. Therefore it’s necessary to not only delete unwanted emails but to organise emails into logically named subfolders to improve performance and also aid with locating relevant emails.
You can avoid these issues by looking at the three main ways for controlling the size of mail stores:
Manage the size of the emails stored
In order to automatically reduce the size of your mailbox, you can active an Auto-Archive feature to handle this for you. This feature automatically downloads and saves emails onto your local hard drive into its own Archive folder.
Mange the number of emails stored
Not only do you have a fixed amount of space for your mailbox, but a large amount of items in your mailbox can reduce the efficiency of your Outlook-Exchange connection. The best way to keep your Exchange mailbox size to a manageable level is to move non-critical email out of your Exchange Mailbox and into your Personal Folders. While email residing in your mailbox is stored on the server, email that are saved on your Personal Folders are kept on your computer.
Clear out deleted items
- Delete messages and folders that you no longer need
- Click the Received column header to sort by Received Date. Check the oldest messages to see if they can be deleted
- Identify large files in your mailbox by choosing Tools, Advanced Find, then click the More Choices tab. In the Size box, select greater than 500 and click Find Now.
- Delete any non-essential items. You can also choose Tools, Mailbox Clean up, select Find items larger than 250 kilobytes and click Find.
- Empty the Deleted Items folder to remove the deleted items from your mailbox and your Outlook quota.
