Jennifer Clemente - IBM
Welcome to ShortCuts, a weekly online broadcast brought to you by IBM Workplace. We're here to help you get the most of everyday Internet and e-mail tools to make your life online more productive and more fun. I'm Jennifer Clemente. This week's question came from a gmail user. He writes, over the past couple of weeks I've reached my gmail storage limit, currently 2.7 megabytes. This is something I didn't
think could happen, and it is really hampering my productivity. Any suggestions?

So on the phone with us today from Cambridge, Massachusetts, is Alan Lapofsky from IBM's Lotus brand. Alan has been using Lotus Notes for over a decade now. He runs a blog called Lotus Notes Hints & Tips. Alan, I bet you have some ideas on this.

Alan Lapofsky - IBM
Absolutely, Jennifer. I think there's two primary things I can talk about in the area of e-mail over storage, I guess we'll call it, just instead of storage. And those two would be cultural changes you could make and then technical things that you could do with the product itself, different features.

So let's talk about the cultural aspect first. When I hear from people that have these large-mail files, I think when you dive deeper you end up finding out that they're really using their e-mail for something e-mail wasn't intended to be, and that often turns into something like a file storage area. So, people are sending around large documents, large PowerPoint presentations, large files from their digital cameras, things like this. And they're sending them to each other, to friends, to coworkers, to family. And they store them in these inboxes that get really large with lots of documents. What I would ask people to do is really think about using alternate means of storage and communications rather than your e-mail. Looking at things like if you're sharing a conversation with a lot of people, rather than doing it in e-mail do it in shared repositories like blogs or teamrooms or things like that or wikis.

If you're sending around photos to people, you might want to look at some of the new Internet based hosting services. A site like Flicker or Kodak photo share, or something like that, where instead of e-mailing around the attachments directly to family members you can actually post them on Web sites to look at.

To finish up I'd say the second half would be, you know, now that your mail file is two gigs what do you do? You really want to start to look through and find things like duplicate attachments.

So what I'd suggest is you sort your e-mail by size. Most email products let you sort the size of the message. And take a look at what the largest ones are, and figure out why. Figure out if there's some attachments you can remove. And that will really help you clean up.

The last thing I would add to that is looking at archiving of your e-mail. Most modern day e-mail programs let you actually take off line old content of your e-mail. So maybe, you know, on a yearly basis, you archive your e-mail off on to removable storage, a hard drive or burn it on to a CD or a DVD or something like that. So, once you've archived your email that will clean it up considerably.

Jennifer Clemente - IBM
So Alan, at this point I have to ask you, what is the oldest email that you currently still have archived?

Alan Lapofsky - IBM
Aha, well, so I'm definitely a pack rat, have probably original e-mails from the first week I started as an IBM employee in 1993, stored in my archives of my e-mail.

I think the most -- or, the oldest e-mail I have currently in my active e-mail file would probably be about two years ago when I switched to a specific job position and I sort of kept the e-mails from that. But unfortunately I've lost all those old university e-mails; I wish I had some of those still lying around.

Jennifer Clemente - IBM
Yeah, when everyone was using like ASCII, making little ASCII graphics, right?

Alan Lapofsky - IBM
Yes, I think I had [Pine] at my university.
[LAUGHTER]

Jennifer Clemente - IBM
For a transcript of today's show, visit us on the Web at ibm.com/shortcuts. There you'll find more information on this week's topic. And again, if you've got a question for our experts, write us at cuts@us.ibm.com. From all of us at ShortCuts, thank you for listening.