Email Quota

Submitted by teale on Fri, 2007-03-30 14:41.

Assigned Email Quota
Email Limits
Checking Usage
Over Quota Alerts and Email Locking
What to do if you have hit the Limit
Keeping within Quota
Restoring lost e-mail

Assigned Email Quota

Each email account has an assigned quota for incoming e-mail and for stored messages, such as a copy of sent messages.

Undergraduate students are allotted 100 megabytes. Check here for tips on reducing your usage and keeping within your 100mb quota.

Faculty, staff, and graduate students are allotted 1000 megabytes of disk space. Requests for more quota can be submitted to itaccounts@ucalgary.ca.

E-mail Limits

Your email program will alert you with popups when you exceed your email storage quota or in Apple Mail an exclamation mark next to the inbox icon. If ignored you may reach the "hard" limit which virtually locks your email.

In addition to storage quota, some other limits include:

Incoming message that exceeds 50 megabytes in size will be rejected and returned to the sender.
Incoming message that contains more than 200 attachments will be rejected and returned to sender.
You cannot send a message that exceeds 50 megabytes.
You cannot send a message that contains more than 1000 recipients. (Your email program may have its own limitations.)
You may be restricted on number of recipients on the receiving end, for example hotmail.com may reject a message if it has more than 100 recipients.
Webmail limits the total size of attachments per email to 8 megabytes and a complete message is limited to a size of 50 megabytes after encrypting the attachments.
Webmail cannot open folders that contain more than 8000 messages (approximately).

Checking current usage and quota

Visit the Check Disk Space Utility page on the web to find out your quote and do check how much space you are currently using. The total usage shown includes your INBOX and all other IT IMAP folders such as a Trash folder and a sent e-mail folder. The size of the INBOX is also shown separately to reflect the current status of your incoming mailbox.

You can use webmail to get details on individual folders.

Over quota Alerts and E-mail Locking

Your total e-mail disk space usage is monitored and periodic e-mail reminders are sent if usage exceeds 100% of quota.

If your usage exceeds your quota, your email program will alert you:

Webmail will paint a flashing red box.
Mozilla will pop-up an alert each time you open a folder.
Outlook will pop-up an alert each time you open a message.
Pine will pop-up an alert each time you open a folder.
Apple Mail may put an exclamation mark next to the INBOX icon. You may use the command key followed by letter "i" to obtain a summary of your usage and quota.

The action by the email client is part of the software and not controlled by the IT e-mail system.

To get rid of the annoying popups, reduce your usage below your quota.

IMPORTANT: If you continue increasing your usage beyond your email quota, at about 120% you will reach the "hard" limit. The hard limit will prevent you from writing to folders, deleting to Trash, and copying sent messages to sent-mail. At this point you may have to contact the IT Support Centre if you are unable to reduce your usage. You can continue to read and to send email (include yourself as a recipient as you will not be able to store a copy to sent folder).

What to do if you have hit the Limit

If you have reached the "hard" limit, you will not be able to write to any folder including Trash. If Trash is already empty you will have to delete a message without writing to Trash.

Mozilla, Thunderbird, Netscape allow immediate delete using Shift-Delete key. Locate a large message that is no longer needed and delete it (careful, no undo).
Outlook, Outlook Express allow you to file to Personal Folder space on your hard drive. Remove unneeded messages from IMAP by moving them to the Personal Deleted Items folder and then purging them from the IMAP store (Edit/Purge Deleted Items).
With Webmail you must change the method for deletion:
- follow the Options/Folder Preferences links.
- For Trash Folder, select [Do not keep trash]. Click Submit. IMPORTANT: if you delete a message there is no longer an UNDO. You cannot get the message back.
- After carefully deleting unwanted email such that you are not over your limit, follow the links, Options/Folder Preferences.
- For Trash Folder preference, browse until you find the Trash folder, select, click Submit.

Under no circumstances will IT delete any of your e-mail without authorization.

Reducing your IMAP storage usage

Specific details for managing your e-mail depends upon the e-mail program you are using.

Most mail programs either move a message to Trash or mark it for deletion (with a stroke or X) for later removal. To permanently remove the message and reduce disk space used, you use commands like 'Empty the Trash on imap.ucalgary.ca' or 'Compact this folder' (Netscape), ' Compact Folders (Mozilla), 'Purge Messages' toolbar button (Outlook Express), 'X' toolbar button (Outlook), 'Expunge--x' command (Pine).

Here are some general suggestions on how to keep usage within quota to avoid overquota e-mail access locks.

If you have a Trash folder on the IMAP server, make sure it is emptied (purged) regularly. Or if you are marking messages for deletion be sure to compact (expunge) the folder.
Sort your e-mail messages by size or length to locate (and delete) the messages which are largest - usually the ones containing attachments that you may have already retrieved and stored on your machine.
After fetching e-mail attachments you have received to your local machine or Webdisk delete the message from the IMAP server. Note Mozilla Thunderbird allows you to delete the attachment keeping the message on the IMAP server. Tip: Perhaps you can share your documents and files using Webdisk rather than through e-mail to avoid duplication or cluttering your e-mail storage.
Go through your messages stored on IMAP regularly and delete those you no longer need. You may want to devise an archiving strategy to make it easy to find messages that can be deleted. For example, create a "hold" mail folder that you examine on a regular basis and store messages in it that can be deleted at some point in the near future. Sort messages by date and remove the oldest ones.
If you set up a mailbox to store copies of messages you have sent (often this is done automatically for you), be sure to go through it regularly to delete ones you do not need, or move them to your local machine for long-term storage.
If you have stored messages that you access infrequently, copy them to your local machine and delete them off of the IMAP server (after verifying the copy worked). Devise a backup strategy (burn to CD) as needed if you do move them to your machine. See also Retrieving IMAP mail folders for Offline Storage

Restoring lost e-mail

Don't panic! IT can retrieve deleted emails or email folders. Send a note to the Information Technologies Support Centre (itsupport@ucalgary.ca), explaining what folder is missing and the date you last saw it. They will restore a copy of the folder from the backup server.

For an individual deleted message, include information such as the folder the message resided in (e.g. INBOX) and when it was deleted. Messages that are deleted are on backup for 30 days. Then they are purged from the backup and no longer available.

Note: a message needs to exist in INBOX or a folder overnight to be backed up. If you delete it prior to the nightly backup you will have to request the sender to resend it.

There is a fee for this service of $25 per restore request, payable in advance by cash, cheque, or IDB.