I woke up this morning and didn’t feel quite right. I didn’t know what it was, but something was definitely off. Then I logged on and saw what the problem was.
My mailbox is over its size limit again.
“Your mailbox has exceeded one or more size limits set by your administrator,” said the message from my administrator. Oh no, I thought. And I’d been trying so hard.
“Your mailbox size is 523334 KB,” he continued curtly, and rather churlishly, too, in my opinion. “You will receive a warning when your mailbox reaches 500000 KB.You may not be able to send or receive new mail until you reduce your mailbox size. To make more space available, delete any items that you are no longer using or move them to your personal folder file (.pst). Items in all of your mailbox folders including the Deleted Items and Sent Items folders count against your size limit. You must empty the Deleted Items folder after deleting items or the space will not be freed. See client Help for more information.”
Naturally, this was very disappointing to me. I thought I had the problem solved. Last month, when my system administrator brought this up for the six or seventh time since late 2006, I thought I took the proper steps to get myself in proper shape.
First, I began a program of aggressive daily deletion exercise. Working my way from the bottom of my Sent Mail folder, I carefully weeded out all the stuff that I no longer needed: newsletters, daily and weekly industry data sheets, self-congratulatory attaboys, relics of corporate thanking circles. You know those; forty messages with everybody thanking everybody else for doing their jobs and you’re on the cc list?
Then I went into my deleted items folder and deleted all my deleted items, then deleted the deleted deletions. I could feel myself shrinking by the minute, slicing notches off my digital belt in real-time, and I can tell you it certainly felt good.
Finally, I put my received mail inbox into chronological order and liposucked everything from 2007 into the garbage. After that, of course, I had to deleted the deletions and delete the deleted deletions again. That came pretty naturally. Once you begin a regimen like this, it becomes part of your life, hopefully, and you don’t need to be reminded of your commitment.
That was several weeks ago. Since then, I thought I’d been keeping up with my program. That’s why this morning’s missive from my system administrator was so distressing. I guess it’s harder to stay electronically fit than I thought. You start the day with good intentions, then you get into something with a lawyer, or a journalist, or one of the folks in Accounting, God help me, and pretty soon you’ve got a chain going that plumps you up and leaves your whole situation in terminal shape.
I suppose there are two things I can do, and I’m going to do both. First, I’m going to get back in there and work my inbox as hard as I can, get it as lean and muscular as I possibly can. There are limits, of course. I’ve been around a long time. I’m no kid who nurses twenty or thirty incoming messages a day. I’m a mature business person, with several hundred bite-sized servings coming across my transom every eight or ten hours, along with a few big hanks of steaming beef as well. That’s why I’m also calling Bob, our system adminstrator, and asking him yet one more time to let out my wasteline a little.
Just a tad, Bob! Like, just a couple thousand MB, I’m beggin’ ya! After that, I’ll be good! I promise! You’ll see!
