I've posted this problem already in the E-mail section, but only other users have answered there, so I wonder if that's the wrong place to post a query about usage stats. I have seen a doubling in my recorded use over the last three months or so, so I checked the breakdown and see that I'm logged as using 3-4GB/month on e-mail. That works out at an average of 100MB/day. Yet the text content of my headers and bodies received only amount to about 500kB, and I only send a couple of text mails per day, if that, and I rarely attach anything bigger that a 20KB file, of which I send about 5/month, so I just don't understand why my e-mail usage is listed so high. Can someone check the mail logs associated with my account to see what the bulk of the activity is, please? I check my POP3 mailbox every 10 minutes when the computer is on which could be up to 15 hours /day, but surely it takes only a small amount of traffic to query the server if there's little or nothing to download. 100MB/day for e-mail sounds like very heavy usage to me.
I presume only traffic between my router and the Plusnet system is counted here - not traffic upstream originating from the existence of my account in some other way. Can someone take a look, please, and let me know what's using this bandwidth?
Edit: I have now discovered Thunderbird is the culprit. I'm not sure why but it appears to be downloading several MB of data even though there are only 319 KB of mail stored on the server! This means a huge increase in bandwidth use and load on the POP server - could this be what's loading PN's servers - ironically, since the advice was to install TB as an alternative to webmail, this could be making the problem worse!
