How to view, change, and manage your mailbox storage usage and quota in Plesk

plesk-mail-quota-management

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.

Mail Hard Limits per Plan

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

  • Helium Hosting: 100MB per Mailbox – 1 Mailbox Limit
  • Carbon Hosting: 2GB per Mailbox – 25 Mailboxes Limit
  • Titanium Hosting: 5GB per Mailbox – No Mailbox Limit
  • Premium 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 have more limited capacity and do not perform as well with larger numbers of smaller files, like emails. Hosting a large quantity of email can significantlyu slow down the time it takes to complete backups, migrations, and restores from backup – something we wish to avoid.

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 large quantities of small mail files.

How to resolve a full or over quota mailbox

Here are some options to help resolve a full mailbox:

Delete Some Emails (Larger, Older, or All)

Move Older Emails to Computer (Offline Archive)

Upgrade the hosting plan for higher mail limits

Migrate email to Exchange for a 50GB mailbox limit

Migrate your entire hosting account to a VPS to eliminate per-mailbox limits

How to refresh the mailbox usage shown in Plesk

After you have removed some messages from the server, here’s how to see the updated mailbox usage:

  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. Check the box to the left of the mail account(s) where you have removed some messages, then select the button 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:

  • You forgot to clear/empty the trash
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 in 30 minutes to ensure sufficient time to sync. If you removed more than 1000 messages, it could take an hour or two.

Troubleshooting

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.


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

Jordan Schelew

Jordan has been working with computers, security, and network systems since the 90s and is a managing partner at Websavers Inc. As a founder of the company, he's been in the web tech space for over 15 years.
WS-Logo-only-image-large

About Websavers

Websavers provides web services like Canadian WordPress Hosting and VPS Hosting to customers all over the globe, from hometown Halifax, CA to Auckland, NZ.

If this article helped you, our web services surely will as well! We might just be the perfect fit for you.

Leave a Comment