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Freeing up space in your email
Freeing up space in your email

Email mailbox size limit and freeing up space by deleting messages

Kenneth Nyman avatar
Written by Kenneth Nyman
Updated over a week ago

Note! Deleting messages from third-party email programs (Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird) does not, by default, delete the messages from the server.


Your email inbox has a mailbox-specific size limit. When this limit is reached, the mailbox will not be able to receive new messages, and senders will receive an error message stating 'Mail quota exceeded' indicating that the mailbox's storage limit has been reached.

The size of the email mailbox varies depending on the Webhotelli service. During the setup process, you may have set a smaller size limit or increased the storage limit with an additional service.

To ensure uninterrupted email flow, it is important to monitor the storage usage of your email mailbox and regularly delete old messages to free up space. You can see the storage usage of your email mailbox through webmail immediately after logging in, usually in the bottom left corner of the page.

The surest way to ensure that emails are deleted from the server is to do so through webmail. If you use an email program to read emails, you may have set the program to use the IMAP protocol, which means that messages are not deleted from the server even if you delete them from your email program (Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, Apple Mail). The email program must use the POP3 protocol to retrieve emails if you want to manage messages solely from your email program.

You can check the total disk space allocation (including any web pages) by logging into your Plesk control panel and clicking 'Show more statistics' on the right. For mailbox-specific storage allocations, you can check after logging into Plesk by selecting 'Email Addresses.'

Note! The resource usage statistics are not updated immediately but once a day.

Clearing the email mailbox

Most of our customers use the Roundcube interface to access webmail, but some may still be using the Horde interface. Therefore, below you will find instructions for both interfaces.

Roundcube

Larry

Elastic

The storage usage icon indicates the percentage of your mailbox's capacity used. If the usage exceeds 95%, you will receive daily reminders via email with the subject line 'Your mailbox is almost full' regarding the mailbox nearing its capacity.

At this point, you should free up space by deleting old or unnecessary messages. To do this, select the messages in the email view and click 'Delete' from the top menu.

Larry

Elastic

You can select multiple messages at once by clicking the first message, holding down the Shift key, and clicking the last message.

To select all messages in an email folder, click 'Select' > 'All' from the bottom menu.

Larry

Elastic

When you press 'Delete,' the messages will be moved to the Trash folder, where you can still review them. If you accidentally moved an important message to the Trash folder, you can restore it by selecting 'Trash' > (select the message to be restored) > 'More' > 'Move to folder...' > 'Inbox,' for example.

Once you are certain that there are no important messages in the Trash folder, you can empty the Trash and free up space by clicking the gear icon in the lower-left corner and selecting 'Empty' (or 'Empty' from the three dots in the upper-left corner of the Elastic interface). The space will be reclaimed. Similarly, check other email folders—sent items, for example—as they also take up space and should be periodically cleared.

What to do if moving messages to the Trash fails?

If your email mailbox is completely full, moving messages to the Trash may not be possible, and you may receive an error message stating "Error occurred. Disk space is full. Press SHIFT + DEL to delete the message"

This is because the IMAP protocol does not have a specific function for moving messages from one folder to another; rather, at the file level, moving a message involves first copying it to the destination folder and then deleting the original message. This process fails if the email mailbox is so full that there is no space available for copying. You can solve this problem by either permanently deleting the messages (by pressing SHIFT + DEL) or adjusting the webmail settings under 'Settings' > 'Server Settings' and checking the box 'Delete messages that fail to be moved to the Trash.'

Alternatively, you can check the box 'Mark messages as deleted instead of moving them to the Trash,' which means that the messages will not be moved to a separate Trash folder but will be marked as deleted by crossing them out (similar to the default behavior in the old Horde webmail). After marking the messages as deleted, you can delete them and free up space by selecting 'Compact' from the gear icon in the lower-left corner.

Horde

The storage usage display shows the percentage of your mailbox's capacity used and the mailbox size. At 75% capacity, the color of the gauge changes to yellow, and at 95% capacity, it changes to red, indicating that the mailbox is almost full.

At this point, you should free up space by selecting and deleting old or unnecessary messages from the email view by clicking 'Delete' from the top menu.

TIP! To select multiple messages at once, click the first message, hold down the Shift key, and click the last message.

To select all messages in an email folder, click the top checkbox next to the 'Sender' column.

At this point, the messages will be moved to the Trash and displayed as crossed out, still taking up space in your email mailbox. To permanently remove them, click 'More' from the gear icon in the lower-left corner and select 'Empty Deleted.'

Similarly, check other email folders—for example, sent items—as they also take up space and should be periodically cleared. If desired, you can also hide/show the crossed-out messages by selecting 'Hide deleted' or 'Show deleted' from the 'More' submenu.

Please note that in the 'Dynamic' view mode, all messages in your email folder are selected if you click the checkbox at the top (all checked). Therefore, be careful when deleting messages, and select them individually to avoid accidentally emptying your entire email mailbox of all messages.

"What if I don't want to delete my old messages and want to preserve my email history?"

In that case, you have the following options: You can either subscribe to the additional service of increasing the mailbox size limit or configure an email program that uses the POP3 connection to retrieve emails primarily. The POP3 program moves all emails to your computer's hard drive and clears the mailbox with each retrieval, preventing it from filling up.

You can also use the IMAP protocol to retrieve emails instead of the POP3 protocol, but in that case, you must remember to manually delete emails from the server. Alternatively, you can archive emails to a location of your choice, such as your computer's local storage.

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