Management of Electronic Mailboxes

Last revision: August 9, 2004

Information Technology Systems and Services monitors the sizes of all electronic mailboxes on a nightly basis. If your mailbox exceeds a certain limit, an automated procedure will move your mail from your incoming mailbox to a mail folder in your personal directory. Your mail will not be deleted, but you must access it differently. The reasons we do this are:

Users can suddenly encounter problems while reading their mail because their inbox has grown too large to work with.
It is now more common for email to contain more than text. It is easy to include attachments such as pictures, data, video, voice, animations, documents, etc. Attachments increase the size of the message, sometimes considerably.
Although ITSS restricts the size of any one piece of mail that is delivered, it is still possible for many customers to receive many large pieces of mail. UMD receives hundreds of megabytes of email a day. Much of this is processed each day by the individuals who receive it. When mail is left unread it accumulates and can grow very large rapidly, especially if it contains attachments or the customer is on a list server.
Users who have large inbox areas put an extra load on the system while they read their mail. The system has to read through the whole inbox, sort it, and on demand, rewrite it. Many customers accessing very large inbox areas can cause the whole mail system to slow down.
Although we have allocated a large area for mailboxes, if we let mailboxes grow without limits we will run out of space very quickly.

The process we follow is that each night a check is made of all the mailboxes on the system. If your mailbox size exceeds a certain size, it will be moved to your folder area. A message will be sent to you that indicates your mailbox has been moved, and it will give you the folder name that was assigned to your mail. The folder name will be the word mbox followed by a '.' and the date, for example, mbox.20000122. You will still be able to access the mail, but you will have to use the folder commands in your respective mailer to do so. The mail message sent to you includes the information as to how to access your mail folder area.

Email users who leave their system and email client connected all the time should note that the above procedure may cause them some problems. Most mail reader software packages will notice that the mailbox size has changed (it is ok for it to grow, but not ok for it to shrink), and this may require you to reconnect when your mailbox is moved. This sometimes means you will lose whatever changes you have made to your mailbox, for example, any messages marked for deletion may reappear the next time you access this folder.

You can keep your inbox small by using the folder feature to save your mail, or by marking email for deletion. Note that mail, whether it is in your inbox or a folder area, is charged at the standard rate for disk storage.

If you have any questions about the process of moving your inbox please contact our Help Desk at 8847. If you have any questions about billing please contact the ITSS Department Office (itss, 7587).