How did my account run out of space? (mail usage troubleshooting)

[Jason]

My account says I've exceeded my quota!  How did this happen?  My website itself is only a few mb in size?

I see this quite often (probably once every other week) so here are the likely causes and solutions should you find that your account has reached (or exceeded) it's available quotas.

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1.  The biggest cause of this I've seen is due to having your "default address" in cpanel set to go to your defaul mailbox.  This used to be how cpanel setup an account by default and it's caused people issues quite often. 

What's a default address?  The default address allows you to tell ALL mail coming into your account that's not addressed to a pop account that you created to go to a specific place.  For example, if I was using a default address for Charlottezweb (which I don't), you could email MickeyMouse@charlottezweb.com and that email would get forwarded to my default address.  Some people find this useful so that they get everything that comes to them.  In the age of spam however, that's about 99% of times a bad idea.

So step one is to make sure your default address is set to the "discard" option.  That just quietly deletes any inbound email that isn't addressed to a real account.

After you've done that, you won't get anymore email there again.  However, how do you clear out the email that's there now?

If you have a ridiculous amount, you may want to open a support ticket to have it cleared.  Otherwise, the way I recommend is logging into webmail for your account.  Instead of logging in with your full email address and password like you normally would, login using your cpanel credentials to webmail.  That logs you into that default address I mentioned above.  I'd recommend choosing Squirrelmail as your reader.  Once you get in, you'll likely be faced with hundreds (or thousands) of junk emails.  At this point I go into the squirrelmail options and set the page view to show 1000 messages at a time.  Then you can go back and select-all and delete in groups of 1000.  That makes quicker work of it than doing it in groups of 50 or so.

Make sure to "purge" your trashcan when you're done which brings me to the next cause...

2.  Not purging your trash or sent items in webmail.  When you delete email in webmail, it goes into your trashcan however it just sits there.  It's still using space.  You have to click the "purge" link to actually empty it for good. 

The "sent" items in webmail also counts towards your quota.  Make sure that's emptied from time to time as appropriate.

3.  A third thing I'd recommend is to go under the "view disk usage" icon in cPanel. There you can see exactly where your disk usage is taking place and narrow it down to specific mailboxes or website files, etc.  That's a good place to start if you need to start clearing out files you no longer need.

4.  If you're using Spam Assassin on your mailboxes, make sure to check whether you enabled "Spam Box" within it.  If you did, you have to login to cpanel from time to time and click the link to clear your spam box.  (For that reason, I don't use Spam Box personally but some people like it).

5.  Another option is always to upgrade your account size but if you're losing space due to files you're not aware of, it's best to solve those problems rather than ignoring them.

[Steve]

So step one is to make sure your default address is set to the "discard" option.  That just quietly deletes any inbound email that isn't addressed to a real account.

Jason, where can i find this option?

[Jason]

There should be an icon in cPanel for "default address" -- it's on that page

[Mark]

One thing I wanted to point out, and I don't know if it fits in this topic, is that if you have a quota set for your e-mail account and you are near full you will also get a quota full message if you are trying to move mail around folders that have large attatchments or equal more space than you have available.

Example: If you have a mailbox limit of 20 MB and you have 15 MB used. If you have an e-mail with an attachment of, say, 7 MB you will not be able to move it to another folder.

Not quite sure why cPanel treats it as more mail and not just moving mail, but it does. I know that when moving stuff it creates a temporary e-mail for the move but you would think it wouldn't count it towards your limit.

So watch out for those large attachments. I personally try to download the attachments and then use a mail client such as Thunderbird that has the ability to delete the attachment while retaining the original e-mail via IMAP access.