The Information Resources and Technology department is asking Sacramento State faculty and staff to help with some easy electronic spring cleaning.

IRT will be asking faculty and staff members to hit delete on emails not needed that take up a majority of the e-mail server at Sac State.

IRT reports that faculty and staff across campus receive around 200,000 emails daily. The school’s email system runs on a server and all emails are stored in this server as opposed to on the user’s computer. When the storage on the server is taken up, the university must purchase more.

Emails from just faculty and staff take up more then a terabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes, of space on servers located throughout campus.

When a faculty or staff member reaches one gigabyte on their email, their accounts are frozen.

Lucinda Parker, project and policy manager at IRT, suggested the easiest way to get rid of unwanted emails and save the school money and server space is to delete messages in the sent folder.

Parker hopes to train current and future faculty and staff members through orientations when they first arrive at campus, and online education of how to help manage emails.

More resources will be available to help better organize and clean up people’s email boxes and the efforts will continue on as the Sac State community grows. This is the beginning of what will become an on going effort to try and curb buying more space on the email server, Parker said.

Settings can be placed in Microsoft Outlook to automatically delete sent emails after a certain amount of time. Other settings can filter junk mail through spam blockers.

Anne Morrison can be reached at [email protected].