Full mailbox: how to make room for new mail
PrintThe classic sign is that people who write to you get a bounce saying “mailbox is full” or “quota exceeded”, and nothing new arrives. Every mailbox has a storage limit (its quota), set when it was created, and all mailboxes together use the disk space of your hosting account. You can either clear space inside the mailbox or give it a larger quota, and doing both is usually the best fix.
Start by checking each mailbox
In cPanel, open Email, then Email Accounts. Each address shows how much space it uses against its quota. To see how much of the whole account goes on email, use the tool described in How to view disk usage information in cPanel.
What usually fills a mailbox
- Trash and the Spam or Junk folder, which keep everything until they are emptied;
- the Sent folder, especially messages sent with attachments over the years;
- old messages carrying large files: quotes, scanned invoices, photos;
- newsletters and automatic notifications nobody reads any more.
Clearing it out in webmail
- Log in to webmail (see the webmail interface) with the full address and its password.
- Empty Trash and Spam: open the folder's menu and choose the option to empty it.
- Go to the Inbox and then Sent, sort by size and work down from the largest messages. Save any attachments you still need to your computer, then delete the messages.
- Empty Trash again, because deleted messages land there and keep using space until it is emptied.
Tip: in the webmail settings you can have Trash emptied automatically when you log out, so deleted mail stops piling up.
Archiving on your computer
If you need to keep old correspondence, move it in your mail program (Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail) into a local folder such as “Local Folders” or “On My Computer”. With IMAP, messages moved there leave the server and free up quota. Remember that a local archive needs its own backup: if the computer's disk fails, the messages go with it.
Using POP3?
Look at the “Leave a copy of messages on the server” option in your mail program. If it is on and nothing is ever removed, the server mailbox keeps filling up even though the mail is already on your computer. Also turn on removal from the server after, say, 14 or 30 days. If you read mail on more than one device, IMAP is the better choice; the settings are in Setting up mail clients for working with mail.
Raising the quota
- In cPanel, open Email, then Email Accounts.
- Click Manage next to the address.
- In the storage section, enter a larger value or select Unlimited, then save.
“Unlimited” means the real limit becomes the free space of the whole hosting account. If the account itself is short of space, the article on freeing up disk space in cPanel helps, or you can move to a bigger plan in the client area (Services, the service, then Upgrade/Downgrade).
Be careful with automatic spam deletion in the cPanel filters: it can also remove genuine messages that were marked by mistake. Emptying the Spam folder by hand on a regular basis is safer.
