Clearing Space in Lotus Notes

To clear space in your account and to keep it from becoming cluttered, it is helpful to delete mail, tasks, invitations, or other documents as you read or complete them. You can also use folders to sort mail. Remember - whenever you delete a document from one view in Lotus Notes, it is deleted from all views. Here are some suggestions for clearing space in your Lotus Notes account:

• Go to the All Documents view and click on the Size heading to sort messages by size. This will help you identify the largest messages so you can remove them if you want to.

• You can select and delete multiple messages by clicking to place checkmarks in the empty column to the left of any messages you wish to delete. Then you can delete all of the selected messages at once.

• If you're using the LN Client, another trick is to save large attachments to your local computer, and then delete the attachments from the messages. This way you can still keep the messages if you want to. This cannot be done using the iNotes (browser) version. iNotes lets you save attachments to your computer, but it won't let you delete an attachment and still keep the message.

• Archiving removes messages from your account on the LN mail server and creates an archive database on your local machine. For information about how to archive, see Lotus Notes Archiving Instructions.

After deleting messages from Lotus Notes, the e-mail database needs to be compacted to reduce its size. Databases are automatically compacted overnight. If you are receiving an "exceeding threshold" or "over quota" message, it will not go away until the database has been compacted (assuming you have cleared enough space).

Compacting the database can also be done manually using the Lotus Notes Client, but not with iNotes (the browser version). To compact your database using the Client program: Go to the Inbox, and then click on File, Database, and Properties. Click on the "i" tab (information). The file size will be shown next to Disk Space. Click Compact. A request to compact the database will be sent to the server. Please allow a few hours for the compacting to take place. To verify that the database has been compacted, you can refresh the data shown in the Properties window by closing it and then opening it again (File, Database, Properties). After the compacting is finished, the Disk Space number will be updated.