Email quotas

As with any email service, each of your mailboxes will be limited in the total size of all the emails it can contain.

If you are using an email client such as Outlook or Outlook Express, and you donwload emails regularly, the mailbox size limit ('mailbox quota') is unlikely to affect you as the mailbox is emptied every time you check for new emails.

If you use webmail you need to be aware of how much space you have left available, as emails stay on the server until you delete them. The available space is shown at the top right of your inbox.

Email size

The maximum size of an individual email that can be received is limited to the space available in your mailbox. For example, if you have a 20Mb mailbox and you have used 19Mb, the maximum size of email that can be received would be 1Mb (20Mb - 19Mb).

Remember that emails have to encode files as plain text, which increases their size. So a 1Mb word document may end up being 1.5Mb when attached to an email.

Deleted items

If you have your webmail set up to send deleted items to the 'Deleted items' folder, these deleted items still count as used space. So it is important to navigate to the 'Delete items' folder regularly to delete the 'Deleted items' to free up space.

TIP: To find large emails that are taking up a lot of space, click the 'Size' tab at the top of your Inbox (and other folders). This will put the largest emails at the top of the list.

Destroy versus Delete

Delete will normally move emails to your 'Deleted items' folder, where you can recover them if necessary.

Destroy will permanently delete the email and it will no longer take up space.