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November 06, 2005
Email Quotas - Friend or Foe?
More and more companies I have been working with seem to have IT policies about email quotas and limits that range from the extreme, automatically sweeping and deleting the Inbox every 2 weeks, to size limits on the mail file with gentle reminders asking the user to clean out some folders.
On one hand, I can see email quotas being extremely effective in helping users to stay on track with processing if employees are given best practices on how to do that, like with GTD, but at what point do these kind of rules become anti-productive? For example, one client shared with me that their company is deleting anything older than 12 months left in Lotus Notes email. They lost key project history from previous years because they didn't save to CD or print hard copy. They now need to recreate the project from scratch. But even saving to CD and hard disk isn't an option for some because of liability reasons (e.g. the Enron debacle). And printing is just going to transfer the problem to overloaded paper files if people don't have a good reference filing system.
Are you affected by email quotas and limits, and if so, how are you dealing with it? Has it helped your productivity or hindered it?
Posted by Kelly at November 6, 2005 10:39 AM
Comments
I have a simple system to keep my Outlook-file as small as possible. The main reason for big outlook-files is the saving of emails with attachements. Everytime an email with attachment is sent to me (or I send one out), I have an outlook add-in that strips the attachment to a folder chosen by me (e.g. the project folder) and leaves a link in the email. The same procedure for my folder "sent". A nice feature is the possibility to save the attachments as read-only, so I never change the original file.
Posted by: Renger at November 11, 2005 10:32 AM
Thanks Renger. What's the name of the Add-in you use for saving attachments? That sounds very useful.
Posted by: Kelly at November 11, 2005 03:38 PM
It is called you perform.(http://www.yousoftware.com/perform/)
Posted by: Renger at November 12, 2005 12:20 AM
