mailbox limits

[#1]

Hi
How do I check the amount of storage my mailbox is taking up. I cant seem to find any tools to do this. ?
I have looked in the member centre and webmail areas but can't find a method of checking my mailbox size.
I am on the 8mb broadband package.
Any help appreciated
cheers

[#2]

Hiya,
We don't actually have any tools available to see how much data you have in your mailbox.
As a general rule, we'd only really get in touch with you if it was excessive, rather than blocking people for reaching a certain amount.

[#3]

thanks for the info.
Could you let me know what my mailbox storage limit  is?
I am on the "up to "8Mb" Broadband adsl package.
cheers

[#4]

There's isn't a specific limit, but if it became excessive, we get in touch with you.

[#5]

I've just had a message from Plusnet saying that I have "large volumes of email stored on our servers" and threatening to delete the contents of my mailbox in 7 days. I am not happy about this AT ALL.
There's no stated limit to mailbox usage and I have no way of checking how much I'm using, yet suddenly I get threatened with having all my mail deleted because I've passed some secret limit!
Looking at the mailbox, I reckon it can't be more than a couple of hundred megabytes (yes, meg, not gig) which in this day and age is not a lot at all. I use Thunderbird and IMAP to manage my mail on the server so that I can log in from any PC in my house, or via webmail from anywhere in the world, and refer to information in archived emails when necessary.
I pay a lot of money to Plusnet for a premium account and have very modest bandwidth usage, so I'm baffled as to why they've gone out of their way to antagonise me over fairly trivial amounts of disk space.
Adding insult to injury, the messages suggested that maybe I was gettign lots of spam, and recommended diverting the default ID to a black hole. I did that months ago, but I still get a lot of spam to my non-default IDs. Why is that? Not because of anything I've done - it's because of the notorious security breach where Plusnet allowed hackers to get full lists of customers' registered email IDs, which the hackers promptly sold to spammers. Plusnet support, think these things through before you start laying the blame on the customer.

[#6]

Hi Andy,
TBH, it is normally when it gets in the region of GB's that we'd contact you and ask you to reduce the size of your mailbox. I certainly can't see there being a problem with a couple of hundred MB.
I notice you've two mailboxes on the account. Have you checkd them both?

[#7]

Hi Andy
I apologise in advance if this is teaching you to suck eggs...
My mail client is set not to delete the last 30 days of email from Plusnet. If push came to shove I could work out how much I have on the server by using my client to check what was downloaded in the last 30 days, are you in a situation to do anything similar?
The fact that Plusnet don’t have tools to measure email usage is a pretty good indication they aren’t being ‘tight’ on their notional allowances. I can only imagine that something weird is going on, I get quite a lot of attachment heavy email but have never had a problem.
I guess it would be good to have at least some idea what the webmail / server is holding. I suppose it is only really an issue when you are suddenly told it is a problem, I hope you get it sorted out and would be interested to know if you find out what the figure is and would share it with us.
Cheers

[#8]

i have 2 agree why would they limit it to a few hundred meg that would be point less, and yes you can check your folder size if you use email clients and also imap which i have included a screen shot that this can be done.
regarding the size i was told (i think) that the size limit was based on your package but if limit your account if it gets to large thats fuly understand where they are coming from.
Daniel Simmos

[#9]

@AndyK, I've asked the engineer in question if they can remember what mailbox it was and how much mail was being stored. I'll let you know if I hear back.
Edit: You should now have an update to your ticket. We can see that you've reduced the size of your mailbox however you've got almost a quarter of a GB in your sent items folder.

[#10]

@AndyK
I use Thunderbird for e-mail and use IMAP.  As Bob has alluded to, you need to regularly purge the "sent" folder as it's easy to forget you've got stuff in there - by default Thunderbird stores sent mail back on the server when used as an IMAP client so that you can access it from other PCs, webmail etc. (IIRC OE and Outlook store sent mail locally).
You also need to empty and compact your deleted items fairly regurarly - I found this to be a useful add-on - it'll empy and compact your trash folder in one go (move the button to the toolbar to save going through menus).

[#11]

have 2 agree :), mi sent itemrs gets emptied once every few weeks due to the large number of emails i send through work and peronal email.

[#12]

Thanks for the tips, people. Daniel, I did look for something in my mail client (Thunderbird) that would tell me folder sizes but I couldn't see anything. I'll have another look though. (Also your Outlook screenshot seems to be showing just your local folders.) Paul, I want the stuff in my Sent folder in case I need to check what I said to someone - though I do move some of it out to separate folders by subject, and I expect I can clear down some of the remainder a bit more.
But my main beef is that I still don't feel that I ought to be intimidated into doing so by threats of mass deletion, especially when my usage is still quite modest by current standards. Plusnet support have now told me that the total usage was a little under 600 MB, before I started tidying up. By comparison, Google's free webmail service currently offers slightly over 7 GB. And no, I don't want to use GMail, I'm quite happy using the Plusnet service that I pay for, and unless my mail starts to run into serious gigabytes I don't think that should be a problem for Plusnet.
Support have now provided me with a report of my biggest folders and how much size they occupy. If Plusnet are worried about mail storage then it would be a good idea to implement this as a self-service report, like the existing bandwidth usage report.

[#13]

its only showing local folders here as i use IMAP but your mail client will let yous ee the local folders.
Also if you use IMAP you could drag your email for example from 3 weeks onwards drag them to your local inbox or a different provider or upload them to gmail using iMap.

[#14]

Quote from: AndyK

Thanks for the tips, people. Daniel, I did look for something in my mail client (Thunderbird) that would tell me folder sizes but I couldn't see anything. I'll have another look though. (Also your Outlook screenshot seems to be showing just your local folders.)

I've never used it myself but a quick Google search returned this that you might want to try. I've been saying for a while that we should implement hard quotas (if we did there's an easy way to hack Thunderbird to show you your remaining quota in the status bar) but such a piece of work would require considerable planning/resource.

[#15]

i agree hard set quotes should be used :),
i always say a mail box should never fit 5GB unless they payin 4 the additional disk space for email but thats me to be honest