Rackspace Email storage maintenance and best practices

This article describes how to view user storage in the Cloud Office Control
Panel as well as best practices for mailbox storage.

Prerequisites

• Applies to: Administrator
• Difficulty: Moderate
• Tools required: Cloud Office Control Panel access

For more information about prerequisite terminology, see
Cloud Office support terminology.

Check mailbox storage in the Cloud Office Control Panel

1. Log in to the Cloud Office Control Panel by using
   your Rackspace Cloud Office admin ID and password.

2. In the Rackspace Email section, click Mailboxes.

3. If you have more than one domain, select the domain for which you want to
   check storage.

4. The fourth column in the mailbox list, Usage, shows the amount of
   free space each user has.

   The Usage column is not a real-time reading of the mailbox storage.
   Usage updates once every 24 hours. Always reference the storage in
   apps.rackspace.com for real-time
   storage.

Warning: Never allow a mailbox to reach full capacity because any messages sent to
the mailbox bouncing after that. The system does not send previously undelivered messages
after you add more space, but it does deliver new messages sent after you add space as usual.

Enable storage notifications

1. Log in to the Cloud Office Control Panel by using
   your Rackspace Cloud Office admin ID and password.

2. In the Rackspace Email section, click Mailboxes.

3. If you have more than one domain, select the domain for which you want to
   enable storage notifications.

4. Click Settings from the sub-ribbon under Email Accounts, as
   shown in the following images:

   

5. Select Storage Notification from the options.

6. Check the box next to Activate full mailbox notification and adjust
   settings as desired.

   • Send a notification to the user when the mailbox reaches a certain
     percentage of capacity.
   • Send CC to an email address of your choosing so that you easily know when
     users are about to exceed capacity.
   • Customize the notification message to give your user instructions.

7. Click Save.

Check mailbox storage in webmail

1. Log in to apps.rackspace.com.

2. Click your username in the upper right-hand corner. The drop-down menu
   displays the current mailbox storage.

   

Note: Consider the storage shown in
apps.rackspace.com to be the authority
for your storage available on the server.

Recommendations for users nearing their storage capacity

Notify users near capacity and counsel them on archiving items to free up
mailbox storage.

Rackspace Email Archiving archives email traffic to and from your domain.
For more information, see
Enable email archiving: Cloud Office Control Panel.

Deleting emails frees up mailbox storage. However, it takes longer to
process the deletion if a user deletes an excessive number of emails.
Allow ample time for the system to reflect the deletion in the mailbox
storage capacity.

Email in the Trash folder counts toward mailbox storage capacity.
Follow these steps to ensure the system does not count a deleted message
toward your mailbox storage:

1. Move an unwanted message to Trash.
2. Delete the message from the Trash folder.

The message no longer counts toward the mailbox storage. If you need to recover
a message you deleted from Trash, see
Recover deleted email in Webmail.

Warning: You can recover messages purged from the Trash folder for up
to 14 days after deletion. After 14 days, you can no longer recover the messages.

Mailbox storage best practices

Keep the following best practices in mind:

• Enable Rackspace Email Archiving for all domains.

• Rackspace Email storage maxes at 25GB. Consider upgrading to
  Microsoft Exchange or
  Office 365 for higher storage limits.

• Never store over 10,000 items in one folder.

• You should not exceed more than three levels of subfolders.

  Example folder structure:

  HTML

  Best practice folder (level 1)
     └── Best practice folder (level 2)
           └── Best practice folder (level 3)
                 └── Not best practice folder
  

• Consider removing items from your Spam or Trash folders.

• If you archive or delete messages on your
  local mail client,
  log in to apps.rackspace.com to ensure
  that those changes reflect in webmail.