What is that Email Quota All About?

Here's a list of FAQ's about this subject...

• How much space will I be allowed from now on?
• How can I tell if I'm above the quota?
• How does that affect me?
• How do I clean up my inbox?
• What will it change for me to remove those messages from your server?
• I am using an email program and POP3, but when I log on to webmail, all my emails are there! How do I get rid of them?

Q - How much space will I be allowed from now on?

A - The number hasn't been finalized yet, we will keep you posted as soon as we have decided on a definite number. However, you might want to start freeing up room as soon as possible if you are using more than 500 MB ( = 500,000 KB).

Q - How can I tell if I'm above the quota?

A - You will receive an automated email message. You will also stop receiving emails if you are above your quota for too long.

In the meantime, a good way to have a rough idea of how much space you're using is to log on to webmail. Click here for instructions (click "skip maintenance" if prompted).

Once you're connected to your mailbox through webmail, you should see how many messages you have. If you have more than a couple hundreds messages in there, then you are likely to be above the quota, especially if many of these messages contain large attachements.

Now, sort your messages by size. The size column is the one on the very right side. Simply click on the word "Size", and it will reorganize your list of messages by size. If it shows the smallest at the top, just click the word "Size" again, and it will reorganize the list with the biggest in size at the top of the list.

Now that your messsages are sorted by size, you can see how much space you're using by adding up the size of each message. The numbers shown are in KB (kilobytes), and you want to stay underneath 500,000 KB total.

Removing all the messages bigger than 100KB will drastically reduce the size of your inbox, quickly and efficiently. If you do not want to delete those messages, please read on to see how to setup your email in an email program such as Outlook Express or Apple Mail.

Note: if you can see a link called "Purge deleted" in the upper right-hand corner, after you've deleted some messages from webmail, click it to "empty the trashcan" and actually free up the space. If there is no "purge deleted" link anywhere, your email is automatically purged when deleted.

Q - How does that affect me? How do I clean up my inbox?

If you have setup your email account with an email program, such as Outlook Express, Eudora, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Entourage, etc... and you are using the protocol POP3, then most likely, you won't have to worry about quotas. That's because by default, POP3 email accounts retrieve the email from our servers, and put it onto your computer, then removes it from our server. You can have as much mail as you want once it's on your computer.

Please note that Apple Mail leaves a copy of the messages on the server by default, unlike all other email programs. To learn how to turn off this feature (to prevent email from building up on our servers), please click here.

If you are using an email program but it's setup as IMAP instead of POP3, then most likely, your emails are building up on our servers, and you need to remove them from the server somehow, if there are too many. To do this, either delete them (and don't forget to hit the "purge" button), or simply drag and drop your emails from your IMAP folders into your local folders. The procedure depends on your email program. Usually, your email program will display a list of folders on the left side of your screen, and you should see 2 separate groups of folders: the "local folders" and the "online folders". The "online folders" will probably be named after your email address. The local folders are folders that reside on your computer only. Once an email has been moved to a local folder, it will "live" on your computer, but won't be accessible from another machine.

If you're using only webmail to manage your email, then you will have 2 options:

• you can either go through your messages and delete all the ones that you don't really need, and eventually be left with only a couple dozens of emails, or at least only emails containing no attachements. Please read the question above for more details
• or you can setup your email account in a email program such as Outlook Express, Thunderbird or Apple Mail. Just make sure you select POP3 (or POP) and NOT IMAP during the setup. To find out how to setup the email program of your choice, please click here, and under "Setting up your account", click on the name of the email program you are going to use. When you setup your account with an email program and check your mail for the first time, the program will start downloading ALL the messages that are sitting on our server, even if you have already read them on webmail. If you have a DSL connection, it shouldn't take too long, but if you have a dialup connection, it may take a long time to download all your messages, especially if you have several hundreds of messages on our servers. Please take this into consideration, allow yourself a couple of hours of downloading in case you have thousands of messages sitting on our servers and you have a dialup connection. Once the emails have been downloaded into your email program, they will be saved onto your computer and removed from our servers.

Q - What will it change for me to remove those messages from your server?

A - If you simply delete those messages (if for example you are using webmail exclusively) without downloading them, then you won't be able to read them anymore.

If you setup an email program to download those messages onto your computer - using POP as explained above - then you will have a copy of those messages on your computer for future reference. However, they will be gone from Webmail, and if you need to read these messages from another machine, you will not be able to.

One reason why you would need to keep a copy of some messages on the server is if you're on vacation, or working remotely, and need to have access to messages you have received a while ago.

If you are on vacation or working remotely, you will still have access to your new mail (the messages you haven't downloaded onto your main computer yet), for as long as you do not download them through your email program on your main computer.

If you have setup your email program to leave a copy of your messages on the server, but only for a certain number of days - for example, 5 days - then you will be able to check 5 days worth of emails from any computer you'd like (from Webmail or from your main email program), then when messages get older than 5 days old, they will be automatically removed from our servers, but not from your computer.

Moreover, for those of you who used to have thousands of messages on webmail, cleaning up your mailbox will drastically improve the speed of Webmail.

Q - I am using an email program and POP3, but when I log on to webmail, all my emails are there! How do I get rid of them?

A - If you're using POP but still see old messages on webmail, it means your email program is setup to leave a copy of the messages on the server. To see how to turn this feature off, or to adjust it so that it leaves only a couple of days worth of emails, please click here.

Apple Mail users will probably fall into this category, since the program leaves the messages on the server by default.