Mailbox Size Information

Students, faculty, and staff UWSP email mailbox accounts have a size limit of 1.5 GB. If you reach the limit you will be automatically restricted from sending email until you reduce the size of your mailbox. (Mail will continue to be received normally for your account regardless of the size of your mailbox, so you don't need to worry about losing any mail addressed to you.)

If you are using Outlook you can see the structure of your mailbox and the total size of the messages in that structure by:

Determine the size of your mailbox

In Microsoft Outlook Web App
  • Hold your cursor over your name at the top of the folder list on the left hand side. After a few seconds your current total mailbox size will be displayed.
In Microsoft Office Outlook
  1. Select the folder that says "Your.Username@uwsp.edu" from the Folder List
  2. Right-click the folder, and then click "Data File Properties.." on the shortcut menu.
  3. Click Folder Size. If you are running in cached mode select the tab called Server.
  • You can also send a message to the Postmaster and you will receive an email within 48 hours listing your mailbox structure and message sizes.
If you decide to delete some of your messages here are a few things to keep in mind:
  • You can add the "Size" field to your View (the list of all of your email messages) in either Office Outlook or Outlook Web App.
    • Click "Arrange By" (located above the list of messages)
    • Click "Size"
    • Your messages should now be grouped by size with the largest emails listed first.
  • Check your Sent Items folder as that typically has a lot of messages in it.
  • Keep in mind that after you delete messages out of folders they are stored in the Deleted Items folder. You must empty your Deleted Items folder before those messages no longer count against your storage limit. You can quickly empty your Deleted Items folder by right-clicking on it and selecting "Empty Folder" (in Outlook) or "Empty Deleted Items" (in Outlook Web App) from the pop-up menu.
  • You may want to go through your folders and do some house-cleaning of unneeded messages by deleting them or by moving them to a set of personal folders.
  • Consider the following for Additional Storage Space:
    • Are you a faculty/staff member keeping information for an office-type account in your personal email? Click here to see the advantages of keeping this information in a separate email account.
    • Are you a student keeping information for a student organization or student manager account in your personal email? Click here to see the advantages of keeping this information in your student organization email account.
    • Are you regularly sending/receiving messages with attachments more than 5M in size? Consider putting files larger than 10M in a network file share -- Contact your College Support Team Member or Help Desk for assistance. NOTE: Email mailboxes and public folders are not the best storage place for large files.
    • If none of these options work for you, you might consider using Personal Folders.