IT Services provide a central email service to the University which is based around Microsoft Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007. If you have a CFS account then you almost certainly have an email account which you can use to send and receive email and use for calendaring/scheduling.

• About your email address
• The size of your email account
• Limits on email size
• Accessing your email
• Managing your email
• Using email signatures
• Dealing with email automatically
• Coping with viruses and spam

About your email address

By default, anyone with an email account has a standard email address in the format username@leicester.ac.uk. An alternative format username@le.ac.uk will also work in most cases although this is not the preferred or recommended style of addressing. When your account was created you may have also asked for a more friendly email alias, based upon your name.

You can search for other people's contact details in Outlook using the Outlook Address Book.

The size of your email account

All email accounts have a fixed allocation of storage available to them - this is necessary to help manage the service within the fixed resource available to it. The exact quota allocated depends on whether you are a student or member of staff.

If you exceed your quota then you will find you are unable to send any further email messages until you have taken steps to reduce the size of your mailbox. If you believe you have done all you can to manage your email effectively and are still over your quota then you should contact the IT Service Desk for advice.

Limits on email size

As well as limits on the on the size of your mailbox, there is also a limit on the maximum size of email messages you can send. This limit is set to 25Mbytes.

Most email messages are much smaller than this and only become large when attachments are sent. Because of the way email messages are constructed, this means the maximum attachment size you are likely to be able to send is around 18Mbytes.

If you need to share large attachments with colleagues then you should consider alternatives, for example saving the large document to a shared location, such as a folder on the X: drive, and then sending a link to the document rather than attaching it to the mail message; compressing large attachments prior to sending, using 7-zip for example; or if you are a member of staff or research postgraduate, using a Temporary FTP account.

Accessing your email

There are a number of different ways you can access your email. You can use the full Microsoft Outlook 2007 program (both on and off campus); you can use Microsoft Outlook Webaccess remotely from a web browser; it is also possible to use alternative email clients to both receive and send messages; finally, if you have a supported mobile device then you should also be able to connect to your email using that.

Managing your email

Even though individual email messages can be relatively small, over time your mailbox will grow in size. Extra information present in attachments will also add to this and increase the rate at which you fill your email quota. It is important that you manage your email sensibly to help us manage the service effectively. As well as following good practice advice, it is also possible to both manually archive and automatically archive information stored in your mailbox.

Outlook 2007 and Exchange also allow you to share information in your mailbox with other users and through public folders.

Using email signatures

Similar to a signature in a letter, an email signature is added to the end of your email messages. In addition to a normal closing message, your signature should also contain information about you - professional title, phone number, business address. Then, if someone needs to call you about an email, they have the information they need to do so to hand without having to search for it.

Both Outlook and Outlook Web Access allow you to create signatures which are automatically appended to your e-mail messages. 

Dealing with email automatically

If you need to have your University email forwarded to another address (for example, you are a distance learning student) then you can configure this using Outlook Web Access.

If you are going to be away from your email and unable to respond, you can use the out of office functionality provided to warn people of this when they contact you.

Coping with viruses and spam

Unfortunately, malicious email messages containing viruses, spam and so-called phishing attacks (attempts to obtain usernames and passwords) are increasingly common. We take many steps to protect our users from the threat posed by these messages but unfortunately it is simply not technically possible to prevent all of them from being delivered. There are some measures you can take to reduce the amount of spam you receive; and good practice you should follow to protect yourself from phishing attempts.