Search For Large E-mail in Outlook
If you have ever received a warning message that "your mailbox is over its size limit," you have hit the limit placed on your mailbox size to keep the mail server at optimal performance. You may have noticed that simply deleting old e-mail from your Sent Items folder and emptying your Deleted Items folder do not always prevent the warning from reappearing. For this and similar occasions, it is helpful to get a visual view of what exactly is taking up all that space.
Before we show you how to do that, though, it is prudent to outline when you may get a warning and how it affects you:
| Limit Reached |
Impact |
| 450 MB |
Warning e-mail only |
| 480 MB |
Cannot send e-mail, but still can receive e-mail |
| 500 MB |
Mailbox is full; cannot send or receive e-mail |
As you can see, a warning e-mail is sent out before you reach your mailbox limit. This gives you opportunity to reduce the amount of space used so you do not begin to have issues sending or receiving e-mails. The procedure below will assist you in finding the e-mails that are using up the majority of your mailbox space.
Procedure
- In Microsoft Outlook, navigate down to the bottom of your mailbox folder list and expand the Search Folders folder.
- Under Search Folders, select Large Mail.
- Outlook will search your mailbox for large e-mail and display them grouped by size.
Extra Tips
- Since e-mails that contain only text are typically very small, you may notice that what is taking up the majority of your mailbox space are e-mails with large images or file attachments.
- You may want to save these e-mails or large attachments to an appropriate location within your Documents (T:\ Drive).
- If you plan on sharing a document with multiple faculty and/or staff, rather than sending a large attachment to multiple recipients it often makes more sense to save the document to an appropriate shared location on the Employee File Share and then e-mail only a hyperlink to that file.
- The size limit for e-mails sent or received is 20 MB. Any e-mails (including attached files) larger than this will not be delivered.