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E-mail messages can quickly accumulate in your INBOX folder.
If you "live-and-die" with e-mails, you soon could have hundreds.
Especially, e-mail messages in your INBOX folder will remain
indefinitely in the CEE Unix network system mail directory (/var/mail)
regardless of whether you read them already or not, as long as you do not delete
them from your INBOX folder.
You may say "so what?," however
the disk space allocated to the system e-mail directory is a
finite one as you know very well, and this system e-mail directory
is shared by all CEE Unix network users.
Now, let's think about a worst case scenario. A user "Imhog" has
been keeping all his old e-mails in his INBOX folder over years,
and many contain huge attachment(s), something like 4.5 MB just
by each attachment size along (eh, MP3?). However the user "Imhog" never
had deleted any of his old e-mails. One day, "Imhog" received
another huge e-mail with a number of big attachments (let's say
another 10 MB) from his friend, and that e-mail exhausted all
remaining space in the system e-mail directory.
What happens next will not be a laughable matter. Since all system
mail directory (/var/mail) was used up, no single incoming e-mail
would be received by the CEE network server regardless of
which reciepient it supposes be (not to mention a user "Imhog").
Now, due to one careless user, all other users in CEE network would
be affected - not able to receive valuable e-mail communications
and the original senders in other sites would scratch their heads
over the unrealistic error message e-mail bounced from CEE server
saying "Not able to accept your e-mail..."
O.k., now I admit that I'm exaggerating a bit. But you get the point.
FYI, CEE system mail directory was allocated to a decent size (and can
quickly be add new disk space if necessary) so that it is highly
unlikely for you to have any sudden surprise. Secondly, size of
unread e-mail files for all CEE users in the system mail directory are
constantly monitored so that whenever the remaining space of system mail
directory is getting too low, you top 10 "e-mail hogs" will recieve an
automatically generated warning e-mail nicely saying "please delete or
save old e-mails."
What you need to do is to delete e-mail messages you do not want, and
use "folders" to organize messages you wish to save. (Yes, I mean good
"housekeeping") A folder is a collection of one or more e-mail messages
that are stored so you can access anytime without losing them. This is
just like a subdirectory tree structure in your Unix account.
Thank you for your good "housekeeping!"
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