Receiving warnings that your mailbox is full? You’ll want to free up some storage space by changing your email client sever settings.
Whether you are using IMAP or POP for your email interaction with the mail server will be leaving copies of the emails on the server.
The email client programme needs to be configured to delete emails after a defined time. This might be 6 months, or for a mailbox which receives lots and lots of emails or a few with very large attachments the time could be much shorter.
I prefer to nominate a device as the master. all others will leave emails on the server. Whilst this one will have the control to delete after a time.
In this way I find it easier to avoid conflicts, easier to manage and tweak as required.
Don’t forget when reducing the duration to allow a minimum time for holidays. Allowing that computer which was switched off whilst you were away to catch up.
Also don’t forget to empty your trash folder. The allocated size of a mailbox will be cumulative, including the inbox, sent items, trash and possibly others.
Keep a copy of your emails separately. I like to create subfolders for protects and clients. I can then copy sent and received emails here and not worry about deleting them from the server over time.
If you believe that you have taken the necessary actions to ensure that your emails are being deleted from the server but still getting it reported that the mailbox is full. you may wish to login to the mailbox via webmail.
Webmail may help understand the situation. for example realising that there are many emails in the trash folder. Or perhaps there are some very large emails which you have received. Does you webmail let you sort by size?
Outlook
To make changes to the email configuration in Outlook follow our guide editing outlook email account settings.
To resolve the full mailbox the settings will be amended to set how long to leave the email on the server.
Note IMAP type accounts don’t offer the option to govern how long to leave the mail on the server. It must be deleted via the mail administration. Don’t forget the size of the trash/recycle bin is included in the calculations of mailbox usage. emails are to be deleted from trash after deleting from other folders.
If you are using a POP account the time to leave the email on the server can be set.
Initially the instructions from that article will be followed.
On the accounts view right click on the account to be edited.
On this view click on the icon for account settings and from the drop down menu click on Account settings..
Click on the account to be edited and then click on Change from the menu bar.
Select to leave a copy of the email on the server and tick the option to remove after a number of days.
Dependant upon the size of your mailbox, the amount of emails you receive and their typical size the number of days can be set.
I like to set the number of days to a minimum of a month.
Click Next. And done on the next screen to finish. The Account settings window can be closed.
Thunderbird
After you have setup a Thunderbird email account to make changes to your server configuration in Thunderbird.
Right click on one of your email accounts in the left hand menu window. Click on Settings in the small pop-up box.
In the Account settings view on the left is a list of mailboxes and on the right the associated configuration window.
For the mailbox which you wish to amend click on Server Settings below its name.
And in the menu on the left click on Synchronisation & Storage
On this page you may wish to reduce the number of days which are leaving email on the server. As can be seen I’ve set this to delete messages after 32 days.
Perhaps tick the box to empty the trash on exit. This will stop it building up.
