Currently the mail box quota should be 2 gigabytes. If you are over the quota for your mail box, you will get a message similar to the following old message:
Subject: Account is over quota
Your account is using 278M of mail storage, this is close to its 292M storage quota. Delete unnecessary messages, otherwise new messages may be delayed or rejected! See the FAQ at https://www.pmbx.net for information on how to correct this.
How Email Can Accumulate In An Email Box
If you are using a webmail interface (like SPID, Pronto, or SquirrelMail), then your email actually resides on the mail server. That email is actually always inside your email box and it counts against your quota limit.
If you are using an email client (Mail, Outlook, Outlook Express, etc) and have your accounts set as POP accounts and not IMAP accounts, then mail is downloaded from the mail server. When that happens it will usually be deleted from the mail server.
However, most modern email clients actually leave the most recent mail on the mail server as a safety. My email client is set to delete all downloaded email immediately but I could set it to keep the last week’s worth in my mailbox on the mail server.
What Is My Actual Quota Limit Anyway?
Notice that it tells you how much your quota is; above it is 292 megabytes. In this case the quota is not set correctly. I have been very careful to make sure that the quotas are correct for each email box, but sometimes they didn’t get reset in the past when I increased these. In the above case, contact me so that I can correct your account to the 2 gigabyte level.
If, however, your email quota is set to the current limit, then you will need to remove email that is currently in your email box on the server.
How To Remove Email From My Email Box
If you use a mail client, then you will need to be sure and check the setting for how much mail it leaves on the server. Usually the problem arises when ALL your email is left there. The box then becomes full over time.
To permanently delete the email, you will need to use one of the webmail clients that we provide. After you login to your account, you will need to delete old email. There can be a lot of email in some cases and this might take more than just a few minutes. The key is to make sure that you delete old email.
An Important Note About Email On The Mail Server
I strongly recommend you use an email client over the webmail client as the primary means of reading and keeping email. If your email resides entirely on the mail server, then should something catastrophic happen to the mail server hard drive storage, you could lose all your email. Email is so fast and fluid that there is no time to actually stop and do a full backup. There are plans for improvements to the hardware that will help prevent such loss, but even these schemas can fail.
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