Online email services such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo give free account
users gigabytes of space for storing messages and attachments. These
Web-based mail services allow users to save virtually any message,
document or photo received in an email without fear of using up their
allotted space. Still, even an email account with an incredibly large
inbox can fill up over time. A full mailbox is even more apt to be a
problem if you use a school or work email account with a disk-space
quota that limits the amount of messages and attachments you can store
on the server. If your inbox becomes full, you may occasionally receive
“Mailbox Full” errors, which effectively prevent you from receiving and
sending messages. If you receive this error while you are checking your
messages, you can use tools built into your email client to clean your
inbox and quickly restore your ability to send and receive messages.
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The most common reason that a “Mailbox Full” message appears
is the fact that your inbox on the mail server has reached its quota or
storage limit. All servers impose some sort of limit on the amount of
space an account can use on the server’s hard drive. If you are the
owner or postmaster of a website, your inbox might not have a specified
size limit, but storage is still limited by the physical size of the
server’s hard drive. On the other hand, if you have a regular email
account on a school or business website, chances are your account has a
default size limit. Because organizations may have thousands of email
users on a single server, inbox quotas can be relatively small. In fact,
many organizations limit inbox storage to a modest 50 to 250MB. If you
receive text-only emails, you’ll be able to store thousands of messages
in this space, but if you receive email with photos or music
attachments, your allotted space on the mail server may fill up quickly.
The bottom line is that the more messages you save (or neglect to
delete) on the email server, the faster your inbox will fill up. Even if
you have a multi-gigabyte email account with Gmail or Yahoo, you will
eventually exceed your inbox quota.
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Some users regard their email accounts as free online
storage because the files in their inboxes are readily available to them
from the mail server. Over the long term, this option is only viable
for users with accounts that provide a lot of storage space for messages
and attachments. If you have a Gmail account with 3GB of email storage,
you can probably leave important documents and photos on the mail
server indefinitely. But if you have an email account with minimal
storage, leaving important files on the server may quickly push you over
your quota. Another fact to consider is that server backups by schools
and smaller organizations might not be as frequent, putting your
important data at risk if the server crashes. Virtually all email
clients offer an option for deleting email on the server after
downloading the messages to your local computer. In widely used
applications such as Outlook, Outlook Express and Thunderbird, enabling
this feature is as simple as opening the Options or Preferences menu on
the application toolbar and clicking on a few settings. Instead of using
the mail server as online storage for your files, consider opening a
free account with DropBox or SkyDrive. You can then safely store your
important files in the cloud and free up precious space in your inbox.
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Using the “Delete messages on server” option can help you
free up space in your inbox, but this option might not work for older
messages that existed on the server before you enabled the feature. In
some cases, email clients check only for new messages when communicating
with a server, so if you have older messages on the server, your
software might not see them at all. In this case, you might need to
create a new profile in your email client and then enable the “Delete
messages on server” option before clicking the “Send/Receive” button on
the toolbar for the first time. When creating the new profile, use the
same login information that you used for your primary profile. Then,
when you click the “Send/Receive” button in your email client, the
application should download all messages in your inbox on the mail
server, including the old messages that were not previously detected.
Once you have created the new profile, downloaded your mail and deleted
all messages on the server, set the new profile as your default. You can
delete the old profile from your email client or leave it as is so you
can reference older messages not included in the new profile.
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Although neglecting to delete old emails on the server is
the primary reason for “Mailbox Full” error messages, spam and old email
subscriptions are major culprits as well. If you receive a lot junk
mail in your inbox, be sure to mark those messages “Spam” or “Junk.”
This tells the software that any messages received from those senders in
the future should be routed directly to the junk mail folder and
deleted from the server. Also, report spam to your email or network
administrator so that he can filter and delete messages from offenders
before they reach your inbox. If you subscribe to online newsletters,
review your subscriptions and unsubscribe from any that you do not use
regularly. Some organizations send daily newsletters with embedded
images that can fill up an email inbox rather quickly.
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