In an effort to improve the efficiency of College mail servers, and reduce the effort expended to deal with the large number of e-mail messages marked for deletion that remain on the servers, ILS automatically deletes all messages marked for deletion after thirty (30) days. Every night, Network and Infrastructure Services removes messages marked for deletion that are older than 30 days from user’s inboxes and trash folder, as well as messages older then 30 days that are stored in the junk folder. The age of the e-mail message is based upon the date stored in the “date” header line of the message, which is usually the first line in the message header.
The WebMail e-mail client is configured to remove deleted e-mail messages that are older then 30 days. WebMail purges old messages each time the user logs into the system.
Background: ILS Network and Infrastructure staff members noted that prior to implementation of this practice in May 2004, almost 25 percent of all of the e-mail messages stored on the campus e-mail servers were marked for deletion, which caused serious performance problems and large unnecessary resources devoted to backing up e-mail files. This policy is intended to reduce the resources expended to deal with e-mail messages that have already been marked for deletion by the user.