Very less storage provided on work Email inbox... Options?

[boogeyman]

I've changed companies recently and my new official email ID (Exchange based) provides a "whopping" 50mb of server space for my inbox. A major part of my job involves working on documentation that the team has created and people generally prefer attaching them to emails and sending them across. In a day, there is atleast 15-20 mb of email traffic that I go through.

This leaves me with very little choice but to archive everything everyday. I generally move emails a just week older to my archive. The problem that happens here is that I need my laptop with the PST archive file throughout the time. This makes responding to older emails or working on any archived data really cumbersome if I'm away from my laptop. I've configured my work email on my smartphone but I'm only as good as my "online" emails.

I was wondering if there was a cloud based solution like syncing the archive PST on dropbox or something? Also, is there an email app for android which works with PST files? If there's an approach you guys use for managing such a situation, please mention it.

Thanks

 

[Criminal]

for android, i use mail forwarding service to collate several accounts in one gmail account. office account is set to "do not delete from server" and "auto archive". i need to manually delete unwanted mails from exchange. for my personal accounts, i've set the accounts to "delete from server".

i used windows mobile for several years because it worked seamlessly with exchange services.

generally, it's against company's policies to put anything official on internet/shared space/cloud etc, except when the material is published by the PR/Marketing team. i don't know about your firm but many people have lost their jobs in reputed firms simply because they forwarded documents to their personal mailboxes to circumvent less storage space or to work from home.

you should approach your PM/Director etc to get your mailbox quota increased. if there's a strong business need then the IT team will bend over backwards to help you out. if yours is a lazy-ass company (i.e., they don't have any IT policies) then you should keep your seniors/IT team in loop about your plans of using cloud based services.

 

[boogeyman]

Thanks for your reply.

If i understand you correctly, you forward all your official email to your gmail account, right? So If you need to reply to/forward one of those emails, does it go from your @work.com official email id? And do you do this from within the gmail app on your smartphone?

 

[ayanavish]

Using unauthorized cloud based solutions for office purpose would land you in a soup -- it's data breach/leak as they would see it. Better approach would be to escalate the issue and get the storage extended from your local IT.

 

[whatsinaname]

Thanks for your reply.

If i understand you correctly, you forward all your official email to your gmail account, right? So If you need to reply to/forward one of those emails, does it go from your @work.com official email id? And do you do this from within the gmail app on your smartphone?

Like @gauravH said, don't do this without first talking to your IT/manager. It will be a huge issue in most companies.

Here's another possible solution that your IT may be ok with. Put your email on an external drive.
Split your external drive into two partions. Put Truecrypt portable on the smaller partition and encrypt the second partition. Install Thunderbird portable on the encrypted partition and archive all your email there.

 

[Criminal]

Thanks for your reply.

If i understand you correctly, you forward all your official email to your gmail account, right? So If you need to reply to/forward one of those emails, does it go from your @work.com official email id? And do you do this from within the gmail app on your smartphone?

yes, i forward my official emails to gmail.

when i am using a PC within the company premises: i've configured gmail on my outlook. when i need to reply to a new email then i do it from the office mail account/folder. and when it's something old (i.e. archived on gmail) then i move the mail (cut-paste) to office folder.

when i am using a PC/phone outside the company premises: i use office VPN on windows PC/windows mobile and use outlook as usual. for Android, i use gmail app and move messages around when i need to access old emails.

i've lost lots of important emails in the past because of corrupt PST files, so nowadays i backup individual official (outlook) messages in eml and html format. PST format is not that reliable, so most of the companies are now moving away from it.

 

[boogeyman]

Thanks guys for all your replies.

I did approach few of my seniors earlier about this and they took the approach of avoiding this topic or providing insurmountable mountains to climb. One response I received was that since your email contains client data, you should ask your clients if they are ok with having their data on your personal email account. I guess that approaching each client (over 100) will never ever happen and even if we do manage to reach out to a decision maker, they will never agree.

 

[Criminal]

^^ your office must have some kind of shared storage space for each person. you can access it via VPN/Citrix etc from outside the office. you can move/archive your emails to that space (outlook can handle network drives), so that you are able to access all of your emails from anywhere, while keeping the overall mailbox size small.

i had seen a neat solution in one of the client locations... they had set up their email system is such a way that all the attachments were saved/moved on a shared space. actual email system had only the messages and a link to the attachments stored somewhere else. the whole system was very fast and light.