How to view, change, manage your mailbox quota in Plesk

To check on the current storage usage of your mailboxes and adjust their quota (when permitted) follow these steps:

1. Log in to Plesk
2. Choose the Mail tab on the left. Here you will see a list of all email addresses along with their capacity and current size.
3. Click on any given email account if you wish to adjust the quota
4. Under “Mailbox” you may specify a size, however you cannot increase it beyond the maximum hard limit for your hosting plan. Our quota hard limits are shown below in the “Mail Hard Limits per Plan” section. If you require more mail storage, please see the “Solutions” section below.

Security Tip: When viewing your list of mailboxes at step 2 above, if you spot any mail accounts you are not currently using, it’s best to remove them now. This will help free up space and prevent potential abuse of stale email accounts in the future.

Troubleshooting Tip: if you have received a legitimate alert about your mail quota being exceeded, but the account is not showing close to its limit in Plesk, try lowering the limit a small amount, saving changes, then increasing it back to default again and saving changes.

Mail Hard Limits per Plan

Please note that the maximum possible quota / storage limit per mail account is as follows as of Jul 2021:

• Helium Hosting: 100MB per Mailbox (max 1 Mailbox)
• Carbon Hosting: 2GB per Mailbox (max 25 Mailboxes)
• Titanium Hosting: 5GB per Mailbox
• Exchange Mail: 50GB per Mailbox (or 300GB if you ordered the larger capacity option)

Why is mail storage limited for shared hosting?

These are hard limits per account in order to ensure the websites hosted with us can take advantage of super-high performance input/output (I/O) on high-performance solid state drives (SSDs). Using SSDs means excellent website speed, but they both have more limited capacity and do not perform as well with larger numbers of smaller files, like emails. Hosting too many emails can both slow down the server as a whole and slow down the time it takes to complete backups.

This is why we also offer Microsoft Exchange hosting: it provides far greater mail storage quotas and uses disks and mail storage systems that are better optimized for managing numerous small mail files.

Solutions when you’ve hit your quota

Here are some options to help resolve a full mailbox:

How to update mailbox storage counts in Plesk

After you have removed some messages from the server, to see the updated mailbox usage in Plesk, Login to Plesk, navigate to the list of mail accounts, check the box to the left of the account where you have deleted some messages, then click the box called “Refresh Usage Stats” at the top of the page. The new storage usage will now be showing.

If the storage usage has not reduced as much as you anticipated, that can only mean one or two of the following is true:

1. You forgot to clear the trash
2. You missed a mailbox that still contains larger messages or a large quantity of messages. Example: The “Sent” or “Sent Messages” folder is pretty commonly missed.
3. You removed messages but they weren’t large enough ones to make a significant difference. See the part above about deleting messages to learn how to target larger ones using webmail.
4. If you were using a mail app and not webmail to delete messages, you may not have waited long enough for the mail app to sync with the server. Check back 2-3 hours later to ensure sufficient time to sync.

If you have any questions about managing mailbox quotas with Plesk, please open a support ticket.