Saving Your Email

Your USC email account is limited by the university's email retention policy and an alloted storage quota. If you wish to save your email beyond the period allowed by university policy, or if you wish to save email in excess of your storage quota, you will need to either save copies of your email to local folders on your personal computer or forward copies of your email from your USC Web Mail account to a personal email account.

Per USC's email retention policy, email that is stored on ITS email servers will be deleted after one year. Faculty and staff who have a business need to retain email on ITS email servers beyond the one-year retention period may be eligible for a USC Archived folder. Students are not eligible for this folder.

For more information about USC storage quotas, see the Email Quotas page.

Saving Email to Local Folders

If you are using USC Web mail (accessed at https://email.usc.edu) or an email program configured to use the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), your email is stored on USC's central email server, email.usc.edu, and is subject to USC's retention and quota restrictions. If you wish to save email outside of these restrictions, you may use your email software to copy mail from the server to local mail folders that are stored on your personal computer. ITS provides documentation on how to save backup copies of your mail using the email software listed below.

• Apple Mail(for OS X)
• Entourage
• Outlook
• Outlook Express
• Pine
• Thunderbird

Note: USC Web Mail does not allow you to directly save copies of your email to local folders. You must either forward your email to your personal email account or select one of the supported email clients listed above.

Instructions for Saving Email to Local Folders

• Apple Mail (Mac OS X)
• Entourage (Mac)
• Pine (UNIX)
• Outlook (Windows)
• Outlook Express
• Thunderbird
• Windows Mail (Vista)

Accessing Email in Local Folders

For most of the email clients listed above, accessing email stored in local folders simply requires clicking the local folder (i.e., Inbox, Sent, etc.) to see the list of messages. If you choose to use Pine, however, accessing email that is stored locally can be more complicated. See the Pine instructions for more information.

Help

If you need further assistance backing up email using any ITS-supported software, contact the ITS Customer Support Center via email at consult@usc.edu or by telephone at 213-740-5555.

For email clients that are not supported by ITS: You may opt to purchase service through CNS Computer, a vendor recommended by the university's purchasing department. CNS computer provides desktop support for PCs and printers. Units can find contact information for CNS Computer through the USC purchasing department or by calling the ITS Customer Support Center at 213-740-5555.