How to delete a message from the Lotus Notes mail file

How to delete a message from the Lotus Notes mail file

Document number: 12058

Deleting old or unwanted messages is the easiest way to reduce the size of a Lotus Notes mail file. If messages that are no longer needed are deleted immediately after they have been read, it can help prevent the mail file from exceeding the corporate quota of 150 MB. If you have deleted several messages, the size of your mail file will not change instantaneously. You will need to wait for the Compact server task to run at night so that when you log in to Notes the next day, your file size will have changed.

To efficiently delete old or unwanted messages from the mail file:

Open the Lotus Notes mail file.
Click All Documents to open the All Documents view.
Click the Size column header to sort the All Documents view by message size. The largest messages will appear at the top and should be deleted first to easily free up space.

NOTE: Because attachments take up a lot of space, an attachment can be removed from a message after it has been detached and the message can still be saved. For additional information, see Eureka! document 13023 — How to delete an attachment yet retain the message in Lotus Notes or Eureka! document 10076 — How to detach a file from a Lotus Notes document.
Select the message or messages that will be deleted by clicking in the column to the left of the sender's name so that a check mark appears.
Click the Delete button so the messages are marked for deletion. A trash can icon will appear.
Press the {F9} key to refresh the view. A pop-up window will appear that says, "Do you want to permanently delete XX documents (where XX is a number) that are currently in the trash folder of database (database name)?". Click Yes.

The documents will be deleted from the mail file.

WARNING: When documents are deleted from any view or folder including the Inbox or All Documents, they will be removed from all folders that they have been moved or copied to. They will no longer exist anywhere in the mail file. If calendar entries appear in the All Documents view and they are deleted, they will also be removed from the calendar. To avoid erroneously deleting calendar entries from the All Documents view, you should set the preference so that calendar entries only appear in the calendar and do not appear in All Documents. For additional information, see Eureka! document 12085 — How to prevent calendar entries from appearing in the All Documents view in Lotus Notes.