Technology Services Help Desk

Managing Your Email Quota for OS X

Eudora Email at Florida State University

On this page:
Overview
Creating mailboxes on your hard drive
Transfering messages from your IMAP server folder to a local folder on your hard drive

Overview

In managing your IMAP mail, it is best to make some decisions regarding which messages to leave on the server and which to download to your hard drive. Keep in mind that each user has a quota. If you have a mailbox with hundreds of messages, it is difficult to locate messages you are looking for. It may be helpful to organize your mail into a series of mailboxes within your IMAP account. However, if you have a lot of messages and/or large attachments that do not need to be backed up and that you won't need to access from multiple machines, it may be beneficial to transfer them to mailboxes that you create on your hard drive and remove them from the IMAP server.

Creating mailboxes on your hard drive
Transfering messages from your IMAP server folder to a local folder on your hard drive
The mail remains on the server indefinitely

Creating Mailboxes on Your Hard Drive

Mailboxes can be created that reside on your computer's hard drive, but not on the IMAP server. The disadvantage of this is that these messages will not be backed up and will not be accessible if you are accessing your mail from other computers. The advantage is that you can save messages without taking up your available quota on the IMAP server. To create a mailbox on your computer's hard drive:

Select Mailboxes from the Window menu

Once the Mailboxes window opens then click the arrow next to Eudora Folder to expand the local folder and click once on Eudora Folder to highlight it.

Next, click on the bottom left icon on the Mailboxes window to create a new untitled mailbox within the Eudora Folder. Then click once on the untitled mailbox icon that was just created and rename it to something other than untitled mailbox. This might include the year, month, etc. (See Example Below):

Transfering messages from your IMAP server folder to a local folder on your hard drive

Now that we have created a new local mail folder we will now transfer messages from the IMAP server folder (ie. Inbox) to the new local folder on our computer.

To transfer messages from the server to your local mail folder:

Select Inbox from the Mailbox menu.
With the Inbox window open, select the messages that you wish to transfer by highlighting multiple messages at one time.
With the messages selected go to the mailbox name (ie. 2004 Email) that you created in the previous set of steps located under the Transfer menu.

You have now transfered messages from your IMAP server folder into a local folder on your computer and thus archived your messages locally and reduced the size of your mail folder on the server.