Email best practices

This article provides tips and best practices for email usage at EdenRoc Sciences. It is divided into the following sections:

• Keep your Inbox small to improve speed
• Monitor your mailbox quota
• Reducing your mailbox size
• Email attachments
• Combating spam
• Junk Email and false positives
• Emails containing confidential information
• Limit on sent email items
• More resources

Keep your Inbox small to improve speed

Keeping the number of items in your Inbox to a minimum will greatly improve the performance of your email, particularly when switching between mailboxes. One way is to organize incoming mail into folders, and manually drag & drop or right-click and move individual items as you read them. Alternatively, you can create Outlook Rules to move messages based on keywords in the Subject, From fields, or a combination of fields, as they are received. Rules can also be run retroactively on items that are already in your Inbox.

If you want to simply clear existing items out of your Inbox, without micromanaging individual mail items, you can create simple Rules based on Date ranges that move messages from the Inbox to subfolders based on the date they were received. For example, you could create sub-folders named 2014, 2015, 2016, ... and create three separate rules move items to each of those subfolders depending on their date of receipt.

There are many possibilities for creating rules and most can be applied on the server side, which means you see the rule's affect on all your email devices and mail clients (you don't have to recreate it for each mail client application).

For more information and instructions, see Create Outlook rules to manage your email.

Monitor your mailbox quota

Employees now have email on Office 365 (Exchange Online), where you are given a mailbox with 50 GB of storage space. To find out how much of your mailbox quota has been used, see Check your mailbox quota

Reducing your mailbox size

Although the mailbox size in Office 365 is very large, it is good practice to delete unwanted email. If you routinely send email to many people, consider using an email distribution list; this allows you to reach many individuals with a single email message. You can also create a distribution list in Outlook for your own personal use.

• Deleted Items folders: When you delete an email, it is sent to the Deleted Items folder, but continues to count towards your quota. To permanently delete mail from your Deleted Items folder in Outlook, right-click Deleted Items > Empty Folder.
• Junk Email items: Mail in your Junk Email folder also counts towards your quota. Deleting mail from your Junk Email folder will move it to your Deleted Items folder, where you can permanently delete it.
• Use email attachments sparingly; opt instead to store your documents in a document management solution, such as OneDrive, and share them with others via links.

Email attachments

Note: You should avoid attachments whenever possible. Attachments use a lot of disk space and can spread viruses when received from an untrusted source.

Suggested alternative: Instead of sending a file as an attachment consider putting the file somewhere on a document management system, such as Owncloud or ERS OneDrive cloud file storage, where everyone can access it. In your email message provide the URL where they can find the file. This will also ensure that recipients view the latest version of the file.

If you do send or receive attachments, follow these practices:

• Be cautious of attachments with the following file types: exe, com, bat, vbs, zip, shs, pif, or scn extensions. These files may contain executable instructions, always confirm with the sender prior to opening.
• Many of the attachments types that could pose a security risk are blocked automatically.

Combating spam

Although ERS provides anti-spam email security filtering globally, to block spambots and obvious threats to users, there are other actions you can take to reduce the amount of spam you receive in your Inbox:

• Avoid using your professional address for unsecured commercial activities on the Internet. If you sign up for a service, a mailing list, or are required to register to enter a website, you should use a secondary or disposable email address. You can then forward mail to your professional account if necessary, or disable or discard the email address should it become a source of spam.
• Avoid having your email address appear unobfuscated (in clear text) on any website. If you want your email address to appear on the web, ensure that it is in a form that cannot be easily "harvested" by spambots.
• Never reply to or click on an unsubscribe link in a spam message.
• Consider eliminating any legacy email accounts that you are still having email forwarded from since they could be a source of spam.

Find out more at: Junk E-mail Options in Office 365.

Junk Email and false positives

Occasionally, some valid email is incorrectly identified as spam and sent to the Junk Email folder. If you are expecting email from someone and have not received it in your Inbox, check the Junk Email folder.

Right-click on any mail message, select Junk > and choose how to handle email from that sender in the future, such as Block Sender, Never Block Sender, Never Block Sender's Domain, Never Block this Group or Mailing List.

Find out more at: Junk E-mail Options in Office 365.

It is also a good idea to delete items in Junk Email folder periodically to keep your mailbox size down.

Emails containing confidential information

When sending email containing content which is not intended for sharing or distribution, you should notify recipients that the message should not be forwarded somewhere within the body of the email. Note: In Outlook, we do not recommend using the Do not forward option, since it does not work on all platforms. 

Limit on sent email items

The following limits are set on the number of emails that can be sent from an account on Office 365:

• 500 is the maximum number of recipients for any single email message.
• 10,000 is the maximum number of recipients that can be targeted for email messages within a 24-hour period.

In order to send email to large audiences, you can use a email distribution group in Outlook.An email sent to a group or is only counted as one recipient.