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:

  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.