Email Storage Limits on a Hosting Plan

The bounce you never see

A customer sends a quote request to the address on your website. Within a minute they get an automated reply saying the mailbox is full and the message could not be delivered.

Nothing arrives at your end, so nothing looks wrong. The customer emails a competitor instead, or tries once more and gives up.

Weeks later somebody phones to ask why their emails keep bouncing, and the cause turns out to be a mailbox holding ten years of attachments on a hosting plan with a limit.

Where the space goes

• Attachments kept forever, photographs and PDFs especially.
• The Sent folder, holding a copy of every attachment you sent.
• Deleted items that were never emptied.
• Copies left on the server by an office computer set up years ago.
• Notifications and newsletters nobody reads and nobody deletes.

The fourth is the one that catches people out. A computer set to download mail but leave a copy on the server means the server keeps everything, including mail the computer deleted long ago.

Two limits, not one

Each mailbox on a hosting plan usually has its own quota, set when the address was created and often forgotten.

Behind that sits the hosting account's total disk space, shared by every mailbox, the website's files, its database and any backups stored on the account.

When the account itself fills up, the website suffers as well. Uploads fail, forms that save entries stop saving them, and updates cannot complete, often without an obvious error.

So one person's overflowing inbox can take a contact form down with it.

What a full mailbox does

Once a mailbox reaches its quota, the server refuses new messages. The sender's mail system either returns the message at once, or retries for a while and then gives up.

Either way the sender receives a bounce, usually worded in technical language many people do not read closely. Some assume your business has closed.

Messages already in the mailbox stay where they are, which is why the problem hides. The inbox looks normal; it is simply not getting anything new.

Checking the quotas

The hosting control panel lists every mailbox with its current size and its limit. Whoever manages your hosting can send you those figures in a few minutes.

Look for any mailbox above about three-quarters of its quota, and check the account's total use at the same time.

Most control panels can also send a warning when a mailbox nears its limit. Make sure that warning goes to somebody who will act on it, not to the full mailbox itself.

Archiving properly

Deleting freely is fine for notifications, newsletters and old chatter. It is not fine for invoices, contracts and correspondence that are business records you may be required to keep.

Email programs such as Outlook can move older mail into an archive file on the computer. That frees the server, but the archive then lives on one machine, and it needs backing up like anything else that matters.

Attachments that are records of work belong in the business's shared files, filed by job or client, where the next person can find them. Once saved there, the email can go.

Large files are better sent as links to shared storage than as attachments, which stops the next ten years filling up the same way.

A worked example

A land surveying firm with six staff had used one shared address on its web hosting since 2009. Plans, drawings and site photographs came and went by email every day.

During a busy spring the mailbox reached its quota. For three days every message to the main address bounced, until a realtor phoned to ask why her emails were coming back.

The office computer had been set to leave a copy of everything on the server, and the mailbox shared an account with the website, whose quote form had quietly stopped saving entries too.

Older mail went into a backed-up archive the same day.

Within a month, email moved to a hosted business email service: a mailbox for each person, the shared address kept, and old mail carried across. The hosting account now holds only the website.

When email belongs off the web server

Web hosting is built to serve websites. Email on the same account works well enough for one or two people with modest mailboxes.

The case for moving grows with the number of people, the size of their mailboxes, the use of shared calendars and contacts, and the number of phones and laptops that sync with it.

Moving also separates two risks. If the website is hacked and starts sending spam, other mail systems can block the server, and email from the same server is blocked with it. A website move or outage takes email down too.

G Suite and Office 365

The two services most small businesses consider are G Suite and Office 365. Both give each person a mailbox measured in tens of gigabytes, with calendars, spam filtering and syncing across devices, for a monthly fee per user.

Your email addresses stay the same, since they belong to your domain rather than the service. The choice usually follows the office programs your staff already use.

Moving is a planned job rather than a setting. The domain's mail records change, old mail is migrated, devices are reconfigured, and the records that tell other servers your email is genuine are updated, ideally over a quiet weekend.

The counter-case

A one-person business with modest email can stay on its hosting plan perfectly well, with sensible quotas and a check twice a year.

A move also carries an ongoing fee per person and a weekend of disruption, and it is not worth doing simply because it is possible.

The check applies either way. A full mailbox bounces mail on any service.

Check the quotas now, archive properly, and plan the move once several people depend on the mail.

Before the next bounce

1. List every mailbox and its quota.
2. Check the account's total disk use.
3. Empty deleted items and old notifications.
4. Stop old computers keeping server copies forever.
5. File important attachments in shared folders.
6. Send large files as links.
7. Price a hosted email service for everyone.

Step four is the one that keeps the mailbox from filling again. Most email programs can remove server copies after a set number of days, which keeps the phone in step without keeping everything forever.

Where the server holding all of this physically sits is covered in where your website's server actually is.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.