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Email Quota

Your email account has a quota of 100MB. If your mailbox reaches this limit, you will no longer receive mail, and senders will have their messages returned undeliverable. Even when the problem is resolved, you will not receive the messages that you missed.

In order to prevent his from happening, please consider these guidelines:

Check Your Quota

You can check your quota in a number of ways depending on how you access your email, a couple of options are outlined below:

  1. Mail - Select the inbox and press Command-I (get info), this will open a window showing your quota status. Also, mail usually (but not in all cases) gives a warning (a little exclamation mark beside the inbox) when your account is above 90% quota.
  2. WebMail (My.Dal) - Select the inbox, a yellow bar near the top of the page will show your quota status.

If you find your quota is over 70% you should consider removing some mail.

Find out what messages are taking the most space (usually ones with attachments). Clicking on the 'Size' heading in your mailbox window will list your messages in ascending or descending order by size. Usually by deleting just a few of the largest messages, your account will be back under quota (see below for more info on deleting messages).

Attachments are the biggest contributer to your quota status. One digital photograph can be worth as much as 1000 email messages! Save a copy of photographs or other attachments you wish to keep onto your workstation. Once the attachment has been saved, you should remove it from your mail account. Some ways to do this are outlined below:

  • Delete the message containing the attachment
  • Select the message and choose 'Remove Attachments' from the 'Message' menu

Also, every time you send an attachment, a copy of that attachment gets stored in your 'Sent Mail' folder. You do not need a copy on your computer and another copy in your mail account. To fix this all at once, you can select all messages in the 'Sent Mail' folder and choose 'Remove Attachments' form the 'Message' menu.

Also, if you're consistently sending or receiving large email attachments (5-10MB), you may want to consider an alternative method of sending and receiving these files. Within the faculty, iChat is an excellent file transfer utility. Just drag the file on to one of your contacts to send!

Notes about deleting messages

Depending on your settings, email messages may not disappear after you have deleted them. Instead they are moved to Mail's 'Trash' folder, where they still take up space, until the trash is emptied.

To manually remove messages from trash:

  • Choose 'Mailbox' from the Mail menu bar
  • In the pull down menu scroll to 'Erase Deleted Messages'
  • Then choose 'In All Accounts'

To prevent it from happening again:

  • Choose 'Mail' from the Mail menu bar
  • In the pull down menu scroll to 'Preferences'
  • Click the 'Accounts' button
  • Click the 'Mailbox Behaviors' tab
  • Deselect the 'store deleted messages on the server' checkbox

You may alternatively choose to 'permanently erase deleted messages' after 1 day or 1 week.