Managing the Size of Your Exchange Account within Outlook

Exchange account users on the Office of Educational Technology (OET) domain each have a mailbox on the OET Microsoft Exchange Server. Exchange mailboxes have a physical size limit imposed by Microsoft which cannot be overridden by any Microsoft-supported settings. Therefore, to ensure that you have continued e-mail service through the Exchange Server, you need to maintain your mailbox within the established size limits.

If you are an Exchange client, the OET mail storage limits are set to warn you when your mailbox reaches 1.4GB in size. If your mailbox continues to grow, you will not be able to send mail when your mailbox reaches 1.75GB, and you will not be able to send or receive mail when your mailbox reaches 2GB. However, you can easily manage your Exchange account within Outlook.

For details on how to manage your Exchange account e-mail within Outlook, see How-to-clean-up-your-exchange-account (PDF). If you’d like to meet with an OET technician to manage your Exchange account, just send a note to oet-help@udel.edu.

Who Should Think about Exchange Accounts and When?

In a few CHEP units, it is routine to request Microsoft Exchange accounts—local e-mail accounts on the College mail server—for new employees or grad students; in most units, this service is extended only to administrators and secretaries. The touchstone is generally: if the person needs to look at another person’s calendar to fulfill their responsibilities, an Exchange account is warranted. (This is an ADDITIONAL service over and above the login which allows people to use departmental computers and save to “the H: drive.”) When OET receives an Exchange-account request, we send someone out to orient the new employee. The first step in the orientation is to forward their e-mail from their @udel.edu account to their Exchange account. All their e-mail then flows to their Exchange mailbox; they read it using Outlook or webmail.oet.udel.edu, and save it on the Exchange server. We routinely set their return address to be their @udel.edu address, so they have a public e-mail address that looks like that of any other UD student or employee.

Since this orientation generally occurs during their first week in a new job, people typically forget that it happened. They may be unaware that OET or their CHEP affiliation has anything to do with their mail service. The dark side of the picture is that their e-mail account will be terminated when their employment by the particular CHEP unit is over. Often, in fact, they have been away from the campus entirely for several days or weeks when OET gets the termination notice and pulls the plug. Panic! My e-mail disappeared! So OET is left to pick up the pieces, corresponding at a distance with an angry and bewildered ex-client who is no longer even affiliated with CHEP. This is unfortunate and need never happen.

If OET is notified BEFORE a person’s affiliation with CHEP ends, we can arrange a phone call or a visit to stop the forwarding. We can show them with remarkably little fuss or stress how to transfer their saved mail folders to another account or package them for travel. In extreme cases, we have made differential e-mail archives so that one or more of an employee’s successors have access to the history of their e-mail pertinent to the responsibilities being passed on.

If you are a temporary employee or student worker who reads mail using Outlook or webmail.oet.udel.edu, you need to know this: check in with OET before you leave. If you are the supervisor of such a person, you can do us and your workers a big favor by bearing it in mind and making it part of your exit debriefing.