Freeing up space

Your plan frees up through a few simple gestures, and the space comes back at once. Here is where to look first, then what to do, from the quickest to the deepest. Throughout, your mail keeps arriving and nothing is erased without you.

Seeing what weighs

The account gauge appears in the suite's rail, and in the properties of the drive mounted on your computer. It adds up mail and its attachments, the files on your drives, your calendars and your address books.

The gigabytes are almost always on the files side:

What takes room in the plan	Order of magnitude
The files on your drives	up to 64 MB per file
The attachments in your mail	a few megabytes per message
Calendars and address books	a few hundred kilobytes in total

Two ways to find the heaviest items:

• Sort your files by size. Mount your drives in Windows Explorer or the Finder (how to), then sort on the Size column: the big documents come to the top, across every drive.
• Find the heavy messages. A mailbox's search sweeps the names of attached files: search for .zip, .mp4 or .psd to gather in one go the messages that carry them.

Emptying the trash

What waits in the trash takes room in the plan until it is deleted for good: it is often the first gigabyte to get back.

• Your files. Open the Drive's Trash, then Delete permanently on whatever you are not keeping: the room comes back immediately. Left alone, what sits there goes after thirty days.
• Your mail. Each mailbox's Trash and Spam folder empty themselves thirty days after a thread lands there. To get the room back the same day, open the mailbox in your mail software (settings) and run Empty trash: deletion there is final, and it applies to the whole conversation.

Going through the drafts

A draft keeps its attachments as long as it exists, so that you find it complete on another device. A pass through Drafts, oldest first, therefore gives back the weight of the files attached to them.

Lightening attachments

What you send stays in your Sent, attachments included: a file exchanged between two mailboxes on the account is therefore held twice. Two habits change a great deal over a year.

• Send big files through a link. Put the document on your drive, then Share builds an address to paste into your message. The file exists only once in your plan, whatever the number of recipients, it goes up to 64 MB, and the link carries an expiry of 1, 7, 30 or 90 days. See Your files.
• Entrust a mailbox rather than forward. A mailbox such as contact@ can be read by several people: the message is held once for the whole team, and each person keeps their own read and unread. See Your mail.

Keeping an old history at home

Older years file away very well offline, and the plan gets back at once what they were taking:

1. in your mail software, copy the folders or the years you want into a local folder (Thunderbird: Local Folders; Outlook: a data file);
2. open the copy offline to check that it is complete;
3. delete those messages from the mailbox, then empty the software's trash.

For a large volume, imapsync makes the same journey towards another IMAP mailbox, in either direction: the command is on Moving a mailbox in, last section.

What takes no room

• Your team's addresses. Users are unlimited, and one more address is counted nowhere.
• A mailbox's other names. An alias brings mail into a mailbox that already exists, and it carries its own name without having space of its own.
• The encoding of attachments. An attachment counts for its real size, the one your computer shows.

When you want more space

From my.simafri.com, Simafri Suite section, a higher plan or a 50 GB block is added in a few clicks: a single renewal date, the remaining fraction of the year for an addition made along the way, and the room opened at once for all your mailboxes. See Storage and billing.

A hand with it

Write to support@simafri.com with your domain name: we look with you at what is taking room in the plan and where to start.