Green Team IT works on sustainability

On 16 March, we will kick off spring cleaning! For a week, we will clean up our mailboxes to reduce the university's digital footprint. You might not be immediately eager or think you don't have time for it, so that's why we're doing it together. And with small steps.

We share with you 7 tips to -with few clicks- make a lot of impact.

Rather tidy up together? Then drop by the Cleanup Café, organised by FSG, for those who find communal tidying easier or more fun. Everyone is welcome to drop in, read more about it.

Together, we are making our campus digitally cleaner.

First of all, start measuring your own data. You can do this by going to File > Info in (the old) Outlook. Then you will immediately see how many GB you are currently consuming. And in the new Outlook, do this via Settings (cog wheel at the top right) > enter'storage' in the search bar. After cleaning up, you can do this again to see how much you have deleted.

Digital Cleanup tips:

• Day 1 - Delete old mails in bulk

Use the search function and search for mails older than 1 year. Select a large group of messages (e.g. newsletters, automatic notifications or old appointments) and delete at least 50 at a time.

• Day 2 - Unsubscribe from newsletters

Do you receive newsletters you never read? Click "unsubscribe" on at least one newsletter. This way, you avoid saving new emails all the time in the future.

• Day 3 - Search for and delete large emails

Search your inbox for large messages (e.g. larger than 10 MB). These are often emails with heavy attachments such as presentations or images. Delete messages you no longer need.

• Day 4 - Empty your recycle bin and spam folder

Deleted e-mails often stay in your trash for weeks and still take up storage space. Therefore, empty your recycle bin and spam folder completely.

• Day 5 - Avoid new mail chains with attachments

Need to share a document? Send a link to a file in Teams or SharePoint rather than an attachment. This way, you avoid saving the same file over and over again.

• Day 6 - Clean up your sent items

Your Sent items folder also often contains large messages with attachments. Search for older sent emails with attachments and delete what is no longer needed.

• Day 7 - Adjust your email signature

Want fewer email chains? Put in your signature that a short response via Teams or a 👍 is often sufficient too. That way, you avoid long e-mail exchanges and unnecessary messages.

Doing more with cleaning up your data? Read more tips here or join the VU Sustainability Teams environment.

The IT department took Digital Cleanup Day on March 16 2024 as an occasion to start cleaning up data. After all, every email in your inbox creates CO2 emissions. The math is simple: less data, less emissions.

Did you know that an email without an attachment has an average emission of 4 grams of CO2? Nope. And that an e-mail with a photo as an attachment quickly means 50 grams of CO2? Probably didn't know either. That's because such an email is stored in a data center, which consumes a lot of energy. Therefore, an e-mail that you save remains continuously available in an energy-consuming data center.

Drastically reduce
Now that you know this, you're probably looking at those thousands of e-mails that have been accumulating in your mailbox for years with a different perspective. How many are there now? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? Even more? As you can imagine, within a service like IT, such volumes cause quite a bit of emissions. We want to do something about that. Green Team IT is permanently challenging IT employees to drastically reduce mail data storage.

In any case, the cleanup week after Digital Cleanup Day turned out to be a great success. The result after the spring cleanup: 40 GB less mail data. 388 employees have a smaller mailbox than before the spring cleanup. So that means that most colleagues have been busy cleaning up the mailbox. This action was not only to clean up unnecessary mail data, but also to raise awareness of the impact of data. So keep trying to reduce your data, not only by cleaning up your mailbox (and OneDrive etc.), but also by generating less data.

To conclude, here are some tips to reduce your mail data in the future as well:

• Send fewer mails yourself: the other will receive fewer mails and an unsent mail does not need to be answered. Use for your communication Teams (calls, (group) chats or channels) or if possible visit a colleague.
• Send short emails: long emails and emails with attachments consume up to 12x more CO2.
• Share files instead of sending an attachment.
• Make less use of CC.
• Use reply-all only when really necessary.
• Use BCC for mails to a large group: this prevents reply-all and associated unnecessary extra mail data.
• Do not send thank-you mails: very nice of course, but it creates an extra e-mail every time. If you want to thank someone, use the little thumb in Outlook (in the upper right corner of the mail) or walk by.
• Be conscious of saving emails. Delete any mail that is no longer needed immediately, do not move it to an archive.
• Empty your deleted items folder regularly: as long as the mail is still here, it stays in the cloud!
• Keep only the last mail of a mail thread (if the mail does need to be kept).
• Look critically at mails with large attachments: are these attachments still needed? If so, save them (centrally) and delete the email (unless the content of the email really needs to be preserved)
• Schedule a recurring reminder to clean up your mailbox.