Storage and Backup of Email Items

Owned by Moffat, Ethan
Last updated: May 30, 2018 by Eric Black

SPU server space is not unlimited and each user has an established email quota. Attachments and pictures may be saved to your local computer so they can be removed from your email account.

Gain Storage Space by Saving Attachments

  1. Open an individual email message with attachments or pictures
  2. Right-click on the item you wish to save.
  3. Use the Save As feature to save it to a location on your hard drive. Generally, the Documents folder is a good location to save personal items.
  4. Delete the mail item you have saved to your computer from your email inbox. This will free up space for your email account to receive more messages.

Individual files that are saved to your personally owned local computer will not be available from other computers. Be sure to prioritize which items you retain in your inbox or inbox subfolders.

If your email client is configured to use a method other than Exchange to check your email account, it may delete mail items from the server and store them locally on your computer. To ensure that your email client is configured properly, see Email Client Configuration.

Outlook Email Storage Space

Current faculty and staff email MUST be maintained on SPU provided servers. Faculty and staff are asked not to create local archives of email messages that are stored on your university assigned computer, a personally owned computer, or on removable media. Since employee email is a vital institutional business tool, it needs to be managed and preserved with care and caution. Faculty and staff should review the Email Retention and Recovery Policy for additional guidance.

For students and alumni, an alternative if you are using Microsoft Outlook 2010 or 2013 is to move some of your messages to a Personal/Offline storage location (with a .PST file extension).

SPU uses Office 365 for all Faculty, Staff, and Student email accounts. Office 365 email accounts come with 25GB of storage. Since this is a significantly larger storage amount than SPU has previously offered for email accounts, the preceding steps should rarely be necessary.