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Transferring Excess E-Mail To Your Hard Drive Prior To Migrating To Mail@umd

On the Mail@umd system, faculty and staff members will initially be given 200MB of e-mail storage space, while students will be given 100MB of e-mail storage space. If you use an e-mail account created by your college, it is possible that you may currently have more e-mail than your Mail@umd account will be able to hold.

If you know or believe that you currently have more e-mail in your account (or accounts) than your future Mail@umd account will be able to hold, you should strongly consider deleting any e-mail messages that you no longer need and relocating some of your e-mail messages to local e-mail folders on the hard drive of your computer. Listed below are steps you can use to relocate your e-mail to local e-mail folders using almost any e-mail client:

Step 1: Open Your E-Mail Client

The first step is to open up the e-mail client you currently use to check your e-mail.

• If you check your current e-mail account with a SSH-based e-mail program like Pine or Berkley-like mail client (Mail, mail or mailx) you will want to create a graphical e-mail client for the purpose of relocating your mail and mail folders. Step-by-step instructions for creating one of the many e-mail clients used on campus are at http://www.helpdesk.umd.edu/topics/applications/email

Hopefully, you are already familiar with how your e-mail folders are organized in your e-mail client. By default, all of the mainstream e-mail clients display a list of your e-mail folders, usually on the left side of your e-mail client window, in a separate column. The following example of this is from the Outlook Express client in Windows:

All of the mainstream e-mail clients allow you to save e-mail in "local" e-mail folders (in this case, "local" means that the files or messages are located either on your hard drive or a mapped network drive, rather than inside your e-mail account). The different e-mail clients have different names to refer to local folders (Thunderbird titles them Local Folders, Outlook titles them Personal Folders, Entourage lists them under "On My Computer," OS X Mail list them under "On My Mac," and Eudora simply lists them under the name Eudora), but the concept is the same.

If you have a large quantity of e-mail that resides in your e-mail account, then your e-mail client is configured to check your e-mail account via an IMAP server. Thus in addition to your local folders, you will see another mailbox or mailbox service listed (the Eudora e-mail client refers to them as "personalities"), and it will contain the Inbox folder in which you will find the messages you have received. In the example above, this mailbox service is named imap.wam.umd.edu. If you have other mail folders in your e-mail account in which you store e-mail, they should also be listed under this mailbox service.

In Outlook Express and Eudora, the local folders are listed before the mailbox service folders, but in other e-mail clients like Thunderbird, the local folders are listed last.

Step 2: Create Local Folders To Hold Your E-Mail

At this point, you have to decide which e-mail messages you want to store in local folders (on your hard drive) and in which folders you want to put them. Keep in mind that any e-mail that you store in local mail folders will only be accessible to you when you sit at that computer. For example, you will not be able to access the local mail folders that you have on your computer at work from your computer at home, and vice versa. Any e-mail that you need to be able to access from anywhere should still be kept in your e-mail account if at all possible (or you could temporarily move some of that e-mail into local folders and then move the mail into your new Mail@umd account after you have created your Mail@umd account).

Before you move your e-mail, you may need to create some local mail folders in which to keep your mail. The method for creating new mail folders varies among e-mail clients. In most of the e-mail clients supported by OIT, you can create a new mail folder by doing the following:

1. Click once on the local mail service (whatever it is called in your e-mail client, such as Local Mail or Personal Folders, ) so that it is highlighted.
2. Go to the menu bar for the e-mail client.
3. Click on File.
4. Choose either New Folder (if listed) or New and then Folder or New Folder from the File menu.

You will be prompted to name the new folder, and in some cases you will be asked where you want to put the new folder (by default, the new folder will be put in the mailbox service that you highlighted).

If the e-mail client you use does not allow you to create new mail folders using the above method, consult your e-mail client's Help files on creating mail folders.

Once you have created the new mail folders, you are ready to start relocating your e-mail folders and e-mail messages from your current e-mail account to your hard drive.

Step 3: Relocating Your E-Mail

The actual process of relocating your e-mail is fairly simple and should work the same for all e-mail clients. Again, we will use Outlook Express as an example.

1. Open the mail folder in the old e-mail account that contains the messages you want to move.
2. Select the messages you want to move. You can select more than one message at a time by doing the following:
   • To select an entire block of e-mail messages:
     • Click once on the first message.
     • Hold down the Shift key on your keyboard.
     • Scroll down to the last message you want to select.
     • Click once on it. All of the messages in between the first message and the last message will also be selected.

       

   • To select particular messages out of a group of messages:
     • Click once on the first message.
     • Hold down the Ctrl key (in Windows) or the Command or "Apple" key (on a Macintosh).
     • Click on each of the other messages you want to select.

       

3. Position your cursor over one of the messages you selected.
4. Click on that message and hold the mouse button down.
5. Drag the cursor over the mail folder to which you want to move the messages until that mail folder is highlighted.

   

6. Release the mouse button. The messages you selected will then be copied or moved (depending on your e-mail client) to the new mail folder. To verify this, simply double-click on the new mail folder to view the messages in the folder.
7. Once you have verified that the e-mail messages have been copied or moved to your local mail folder, confirm that those messages are not in your e-mail account (otherwise, you are not actually reducing the amount of e-mail in your account). Depending on which e-mail client you use or how the client is configured, deleting messages may be a two-step process, which involves marking messages for deletion and then actually deleting them (in Outlook Express, for example, you first mark the message for deletion and then hit the Purge button under the menu bar to actually remove the message, as in the example below). If you're not sure about how to delete messages in your e-mail client, consult the Help file for your client.

   

Repeat this process as many times as needed in order to relocate all of the e-mail you want to keep into your local mail folders.

Please note that the method described above is only one method of relocating e-mail messages from one folder to another. Your e-mail client may provide other alternative methods for moving e-mail and will likely describe these alternatives in its Help files.

As mentioned earlier, e-mail that you transferred to your local mail folders will only be available to you when you are using that particular computer. This also means that if something unexpected should happen to that computer, the e-mail in the local folders could potentially be lost. If you feel that you cannot risk losing this e-mail, consult the Help files for your e-mail client and your local computer technical support to find out what your options are for backing up or archiving those e-mail messages.