Prevent large emails blocking your inbox!

Seeing as it’s coming up to Summer and many of us are taking time off, let’s take a moment to see how we avoid the issue of your mailbox getting clocked up because of those 10MB reports you get every day!

This works for Outlook 2010. I’m not sure if it applies to 2007 or not, but doesn’t apply to 2003, though there should be ways of achieving the same effect.

First, we need to turn our Out of Office on. (File->Info->Automatic Replies)

Tick the ‘Send Automatic Replies’, and write your message. Optionally, you can also pre-set the start & end times; a very useful feature. You can also have different messages for internal & external emails.

Once you’ve got your messages, click on the ‘Rules’ button at the bottom.

You should get a screen like this one, but probably blank. Click ‘Add Rule’

In the Rule Setup screen, click ‘Advanced’

Enter a value into the ‘At Least’ box. I set my cap at 160kb, but you can change this (1024 will equal 1MB).

Because the email chain itself will contribute to the size, I tick the ‘only items with attachments’ box.

Click OK to return to the previous screen

Tick the ‘Delete’ and ‘Reply With’ boxes, and click ‘Template’ button

Compose a brief email to be sent to recipients.

Hit ‘Save & Close’ once done and you will return to the previous screen.

Click ‘OK’, and your new rule will show in the list.

And that’s it – anyone who sends an email over 160kb will be asked to resend their email.

Of course, that only half-solves the problem, as I’m yet to find a way of getting it to permanently deleting the email (perhaps a separate server-side Empty Recycling Bin rule would do the trick) – but it usually prompts people to start sending such large files for a few days until I’m back, so does the trick for me!