Managing Email for Efficiency & Privacy: Tips for Faculty & Staff

CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 by Dave Wilson

Mailboxes © Dave Wilson, used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.

We’re all deluged with email.  Official correspondence, personal correspondence, and junk mail compete for attention and space in our mail boxes.  The more email you have, the more cumbersome it is to manage.  And if you have a lot of personal correspondence, privacy may be a concern since the email of GC faculty and staff is stored on CUNY’s servers.

Forwarding and/or archiving email are techniques you can use to improve the efficiency of your MS Outlook Exchange account and/or to remove your personal correspondence from CUNY’s servers.

Efficiency & Space:  GC faculty and staff have a 4GB quota in their Microsoft Outlook Exchange accounts.  4GB may sound like plenty of room, but if you have been at the GC for a number of years you may reach the quota and be forced to take action quickly to reduce the quantity of email in your account.

You can use the handy Cleanup Tools available in MS Outlook Exchange to streamline your mailbox and/or to archive old email.  Useful tips for cleaning up your mailbox are available in Outlook and online.  Help with archiving email is available directly from Outlook.  Just click on the ? at the top of your Inbox for assistance.

Privacy:  The Graduate Center, as a college of the City University of New York, is committed to transparency and public access to information.  The GC complies with New York State’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) and retains records according to an established schedule.  Those records, which are subject to FOIL requests, include email sent and received on the Graduate Center’s servers.

Should you wish to keep your personal email private and accessible to you but invulnerable to FOIL requests, you can move it to another email program and delete it from your GC account.  If you choose Gmail, follow their online instructions for importing email and contacts.  Note that when you delete mail from the Graduate Center’s servers, it is retained on IT’s backup systems for 4 months.

Take advantage of the holiday break to clean up your account and start off the New Year with a well-organized and efficient mailbox.

About the Author

Donna Davey is an Adjunct Reference Librarian at the Graduate Center Library.