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Mailbox Management - Deleting Emails in bulk


Martyn Houghton

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We handle a large volume of emails through the shared mailboxes (over 50 emails an hour) and as part of our settings we move these to a folder called Inbox Archive when processed by the progressive capture, rather than directly into the Deleted Items mailbox which is the standard configuration. We are then attempting to select these emails in bulk in order to delete them, but there are a number of issues with this.

We only able to select 50 at a time, this created an error prior to  Collaboration Version: 2.5.0.510, but now you get a popup restricting you to a maximum of 50 emails at a time.

Deleting them 50 at a time will move them to the Deleted Items folder, where I then have to select them again 50 at a time to actually delete them.

The reason for deleting the emails is to improve performance when accessing the Inbox Archive to deal with any queries or questions about emails which there received but do not appear to have been processed. We currently have over 35,000 emails in the inbox archive,but even with using the standard configuration we would still need to delete the emails from the Deleted Items folder in 50 email batches.

Are there any plans to provide a facility to automatically clear down the Deleted Items folder for emails older that a configurable date, manually trigger the emptying of a mailbox folder or allow selection of a larger volume of emails in the mailbox?

Cheers

Martyn

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Hi Martyn,

We did not have any plan for auto-archiving emails and the implementation can take some time. The platform team suggested as a short term solution an introduction of a new option to archive all emails in a specific folder.

Will that be OK for now? I think can only be better than the current option.

Please let me know what do you think.

Thanks,

Daniel.

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@Daniel Dekel

I presume what you are suggesting is that we create multiple archive folders, to limit the volume of emails that go into each folder, in order to speed up access/selection of the emails within a folder? Using the  servicemanager.email.archiveFolderName  setting.

There does still need to be some improved mechanisms for handling the deletion of large volumes of emails which will be continue to be building up in the mailbox store.

One immediate request would be for the number of maximum emails that can be selected in one go to be a configurable setting so that we could at least try increasing this to a large volume to aid with deleting current archived backlog.

Cheers

Martyn

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@Martyn Houghton

I didn't suggest creating multiple archive folders. What I meant was that you work as you do now, sending emails to the ''Inbox Archive'' folder. We will add an option to delete all the emails withing a folder, so instead of selecting one by one, it will delete all of them at once.

Does it make sense?

Thanks,

Daniel.

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@Martyn Houghton just wondering if switching back to the original configuration might help with this as emails will automatically be put into the deleted items folder. Or maybe the question is, what's the reason for not using the deleted items for this which may help us understand things better :)

 

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@cchana

The reason for not putting them directly into the delete items folder is that we do want to keep them for a period of time and do not want to delete them by mistake until we needed to. That said the same issue in terms of deleting large volumes of emails still applies to the 'Delete Items' folder as far as I can see.

In Support Works we used sub folder for each month and then deleted the whole content of said month's folder when we no longer needed it as a reference, which too put it into the Delete Items, but we where able to select all the emails in one go.

In terms of the change request @Daniel Dekel we would at least be able to clear down the folder and then clear down the deleted items folder in a single step for each.

Cheers

Martyn

 

 

 

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@Daniel Dekel

I noticed in the announcement for User tool 517 the reference below. Is that the facility you mentioned.

  • {#CH00143891} As a User I would like to delete all emails in a specific folder

Is it just the process of choosing 'Delete Folder' and it will not delete all the contents and the folder itself, or is there a different process to follow?

Cheers

Martyn

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Hi @Martyn Houghton

This option if different than deleting a dingle email. Single email will move it to the "Deleted Items" and when you delete it there it will completely delete it. The "Delete All" option will completely delete all the emails in that folder without moving it to the "Deleted Items".

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Daniel

 

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@Daniel Dekel

Thanks. The way we propose to use this is to create a monthly Inbox Archive folder at at the beginning of each month we will update  servicemanager.email.archiveFolderName to point to the next month folder. Then we can delete the content of the appropriate monthly Inbox Archive folder after say 2 months using the new Delete All option.

Cheers

Martyn

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Guest Adrian Hodgson

Daniel - we also need a way of selecting and deleting multiple emails - more than 50.

I believe the change has been made because selecting too many emails was causing a flow error for us so obviously we don't want to go back to that situation.

I think this limit is a bit on the low side - I was finding you could do 100-200 without the flow error being generated so increasing the limit might be useful. it would also be useful to be able to select all emails in a folder and copy to another folder, then to be able to delete all the content of the original folder.

Adrian

ORC International

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Hi @Adrian Hodgson,

We are now working in a new email view, that will allow selecting more than 50 at a time, but this (in my opinion) won't be the best way going forward to move or deleting the entire contents of a folder.

I think the "Delete All" is a first step for managing large amounts of emails, I would also like to see a "Move All" option and basically all options you can do for a single email, to the entire folder.

Thanks,

Daniel.

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  • 4 weeks later...

All,

I would like to add at this point that we are planning to change the meaning of both the "Outbox" and "Deleted Items" folder.  The Outbox folder will be renamed to "In Transit" as this is now the folder where messages currently being delivered are held, once delivered they are moved to the "Sent Items" folder.  The "Deleted Items" folder will be renamed to "Archive" which is a better name for the folders intended purpose.  It is envisaged that customers will want to keep sent mail items online and searchable/accessible so a deleted items folder does not really make sense anymore. Ideally messages that are "processed" (i.e. a request is raised, or a message is replied to etc) would automatically move them to the "Archived" folder, this is our plan it improve email workflow.  We may also look at some means to structuring archived messages in the archived folder into Years/Months so they are easy to navigate.  Thats not currently a WIP but that is our intention, and will all be built around the new mail view (which we had to introduce first) and more powerful push events for the new mail view to use

Gerry

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  • 3 years later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Hi @Martyn Houghton,

OK, the change is split in two parts. One is already done and has been released by the platform in today's build. That will make the empty folder work without timing out but it will also require a Collaboration build to keep you updated with the deletion state. The last one will be probably shipped in next week's build.

Regards,

Daniel.

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