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:
- Log in to Plesk
- Choose the Mail tab on the left. Here you will see a list of all email addresses along with their capacity and current size.
- Click on any given email account if you wish to adjust the quota
- 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:
Delete Larger Messages
You can delete messages using your mail app or webmail. Your best bet is to target the largest messages, often with attachments like videos, photos, or PDFs. Use the following steps to learn how to find the largest messages with webmail. If you wish to use your mail app to do this, you’ll need to consult the mail app’s help guides to learn where to find the same options.
- Log in to webmail
- Select your email address in the upper right corner, then choose “Settings”. On the left select “Folders”. Here it shows the sizes of each of your mail folders in MiB or GiB (similar to Megabytes or Gigabytes). Take note of the largest folders in the list.
- Click Back in the upper left corner to exit out of Settings
- On the left is your usual list of folders. Select one of the largest folders you found in step (2)
- In the search box at the top of the message listing, search by size like this:
size=3M
to see all messages greater than 3MB. Note: If a message in the list has a little box with a number and arrow in it (like: “3 >”) this means there are multiple messages in that discussion and at least one of those messages is greater than the size you searched for – click the number/box to see the messages in the discussion. - Delete all that you you’re comfortable removing. If the message is large because of an attachment (most likely it is), you can always download the attachment to your computer’s files before removing the email message.
- Repeat this for each of the largest folders you found in step (2).
- Once you’re done removing, you must click on the Trash folder, then the “Clear Folder” option to permanently remove those messages.
Tip: Don’t forget about your Sent folder!
You can also look for older messages, which may be less effective. In the search box, enter before=YYYY-MM-DD
replacing YYYY-MM-DD with the year month and day of the most recent messages you wish to see. For example before=2020-07-06
will show all messages received before July 6 2020.
Move Older Messages to Computer
Moving older messages to your computer, allows you to take a local backup of the messages so you can still reference them whenever you like (though only on the one device), while simultaneously freeing up space on the server. This guide will help you learn how to do this.
Tip: Don’t forget about your Sent folder!
Upgrade Your Hosting Plan
If you’re currently utilizing our Helium or Carbon hosting plans, upgrading will allow you a larger maximum per-mailbox limit (as listed above) and will mean no need to migrate your email to another system. Note: Titanium accounts are the upper limit for hosting mail on our shared hosting plans, meaning you’ll need to migrate to Exchange mail hosting if you wish to enjoy larger mailbox sizes.
You may review all mail hosting options for comparison here.
Migrate to Exchange Mail Hosting
Our Microsoft Exchange Hosting is fully Canadian-soil hosted, gets you 50GB of storage per mailbox, and is a business-class mail solution.
We’ll also take care of the migration for you if your email is currently hosted on our shared hosting and you opt for an annual payment cycle.
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:
- You forgot to clear 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 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.
Posted in Client Centre & Plesk, Guides
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