Documentation - Email
cMail Quota
cMail, NSIT's email system, enforces a 1 GB quota on email storage. Setting a fair quota improves the performance and reliability of the email system for everyone.
This page contains some tips and suggestions for getting under quota and managing your email in such a way that you don't exceed quota. The following topics are covered:
- What happens when you go over quota
- Checking how much space you're using
- Emptying Trash and Purging Deleted Messages
- The mbox mailbox
- Archiving Email
- Cautions about deleting messages
What happens when you go over quota
Anyone who exceeds the 1 GB quota will not receive new messages until their mail usage is brought under quota. If a new message arrives for someone who remains over quota a warning message will be delivered and the email message held.
If you go over your quota, you will see the following message in your inbox:
One or more messages could not be delivered
to your mailbox because they would have
put your mailbox disk usage over its quota.
The system will keep trying to deliver
these messages. To receive them, you must
delete some old messages from your mailbox.
Before receiving new messages, you will need to reduce the amount of mail you are keeping on the server.
Checking how much space you're using
You can check your current quota status by logging on to Webmail; a bar will appear at the top of the screen showing how much mail you currently have stored on the server. If you don't see a quota bar on webmail, you can also check your current usage using the web page at https://cnet.uchicago.edu/quota/. This page can also be used to see a mailbox-by-mailbox breakdown of your spacce usage.
We recommend checking your quota usage regularly and managing your mail to stay comfortably under the limit.
Empty Trash versus Purge Deleted
First, you should make sure that emails you have deleted are actually gone from the server. Depending on the settings you use in your email client, you may need to empty your trash or purge deleted messages.
There are different email clients one can use to check email (e.g. Eudora, Webmail, Thunderbird, etc.), and there are different ways those clients can be configured. The two main ways for handling deleted messages is to mark them for deletion, or move them to a Trash mailbox. When messages are marked for deletion, they must then be purged in order to permanently remove them from the server. If deleted messages are stored in a Trash mailbox on the server, they will also still be taking up space until the trash mailbox is emptied. So in either case, please note that until the second step is completed, the message is still on the server and will count against your quota.
Please see Deleting Mail in Webmail for detailed information about using Webmail for this.
The mbox Mailbox
Many cMail users will have a mailbox named "mbox" in their listing of mailboxes on the server. This is an artifact of our old email system, and is not used in the new system. In most cases, it is safe to remove this mailbox, which may save a lot of space. Check it carefully, however. It should normally contain messages that were also in your Inbox at the time of the switch to the new mail system (on Feb. 26, 2005). If there are any messages there that you want to keep, that you don't have copies of elsewhere, you should transfer them out before deleting the mbox mailbox.
If you see an mbox mailbox when you check your quota on cnet, but don't see one in Eudora, you probably have an IMAP prefix set. To remove it, go to Tools → Options → Incoming Mail (on Windows) or Special → Settings → Checking Mail (on Mac OS X), and blank out the setting for "Location Prefix" or "IMAP Mailbox Location Prefix". Hit OK. Your mbox mailbox will then appear in your mailbox listing (and all your other mailboxes, except your Inbox, will appear in a folder which has the name of your old Location Prefix).
You can also track down the mbox by logging into Webmail and clicking on "Folders".
Archiving Email
If you've already emptied your trash or purged deleted messages and are still over the 1 GB quota, then you may need to move some mail off the email server, and store it locally on your PC. For additional instructions on moving email from the server to your desktop machine, see our document on Storing Mail Offline.
Please take care in deleting messages or mailboxes
Please note that the Mail administrators are not able to restore messages or mailboxes that have been removed from the cMail server. With that in mind, take care to back up emails you wish to keep to your PC, and take great care before purging your mail, or removing mailboxes.
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Last updated: 1/22/09