Five tips for taming your NHS mail quota

Originally published in GP magazine .

Written for GP magazine around 2010. This is the version I submitted - the published article may have been edited.

I switched to NHSmail about six months ago and on the whole I’m very impressed. I can view my emails and calendar from work, home and even on my iPhone. In a web browser I have some complaints: the spell checker doesn’t work properly and cut and paste is a bit flaky. I’d also like it to publish my calendar so I could pick it up in other programs.

However, my main problem is I keep hitting my mailbox quota. I recently ended up just deleting all emails prior to 1st Jan to solve this, but probably lost some important ones in the process. I’m used to just storing all emails I’ve ever had. Google even encourages this as a way of working on their mail system.

Attachments are the main culprit in terms of size. Multiple draft versions, and people copying you in to emails that you have already had, take up a lot of space. A much better way of doing this would be to send a link to a document on a shared system rather than the document. Exchange 2007 can in theory do this, but NHSmail hasn’t implemented it - perhaps they need to.

The next problem is emails you don’t want, and the steady build-up of short emails that would be better as an instant message.

My top five tips for dealing with your mailbox problems:

1. Manage attachments better - delete ones you don’t need straight away, particularly old draft versions or duplicated ones, or get people to send links to documents on shared drives rather than the document. You can see which emails have attachments, and these are the ones to delete first when near your quota.
2. Be ruthless - unsubscribe from distribution lists you joined, or add senders of irrelevant emails to your junk mail filter. You might want to warn them, just in case they do need to send you something important.
3. When deleting emails, try changing the view to FROM so that it sorts by who sent the email - you may find, as I did, that there are lots of people from whom you never need to keep a single email.
4. Use automated rules to move emails from important people into folders, leaving you free to delete emails in your main inbox.
5. Manually move important emails to a separate ‘keep’ folder, again allowing you to delete emails in your inbox without worry.