Email Account Too Large - Cannot See Why

[#1]

Hi

Got an email saying my email account is too large, but cannot understand where they get their amounts from.

This is the email:

In order to assist you with taking action, here is a list of your largest mailboxes -

                Mailbox                                Size

                s*****                    833.056 MB

                e******                278.544 MB

                default                 127.748 MB

                n*****                  1.44 MB

                Total                      1241.308 MB

The S* mailbox is set to delete after 14 days in Outlook and if I go into webmail, the oldest email showing is 14th Oct. There is nothing in the trash and sent looks quite small.  Outlook SMTP folder size shows about 200MB-300MB size on that mailbox.

Can you tell me a breakdown of the 833MB, so it can be fixed please?

Thanks

[#2]

Have you looked at that mailbox on webmail?  Outlook might not be subscribed to all of the folders.

When you state that the sent folder looks small - small in what way?  Just a few items?  What though is the size of attachments?  Do the mail items contain a large graphic in the signature?

[#3]

Thanks

As I said in my original post, I've gone into webmail and it's only got 2 weeks of emails. Also I said that the mailbox size is 200-300mb (including the sent box). 

I am subscribed to all folders in SMTP.

Seems odd i's showing over 800mb, perhaps someone as plusnet can give me a breakdown of that number?

[#4]

Hi @minkey

Can you private message me your account username? Happy to take a look.

[#5]

Thanks @Gandalf 

PM sent

[#6]

Thanks @Gandalf for the list.

I realise that some of the recent emails are missing (due to ticket issue), but what you gave to me only totalled about 40mb for emails between 14/10 and 27/10. 

There doesn't appear to be any large emails since then, is there another issue with that mailbox?

Thanks

Jeff

[#7]

Thanks for getting back to me @minkey 

Yeah copying and pasting the list in the way I have has basically broken the ticket as it's exceeded the amount of characters our system can withstand in a ticket. This breakage affects us from properly viewing previous tickets, so I've raised a task with our systems support team (DBA, database analyst) to remove the ticket which should be done next week. 

Have you added the size of them up in kilobytes? 

[#8]

Hi @Gandalf 

Yes, I added up the size of the 347 emails you provided and it was 39,929,714 bytes. A bit short of the 833mb total. 

Is there anything else we can try?

Thanks

Jeff

[#9]

This is a bit of a long shot ... try compacting the mail folders.  I have a vague recollection that email folder size and email storage size can be markedly different where a large mailbox has been cleared out but not compacted.  The sum of the size of email items can be markedly smaller than the file store size.  Such might be ancient history ... but it is worth a look.  Check out compact the folders, get a new utilisation report.

You can do this via the webmail interface.  Log into the mailbox, wait for the page to fully load.  In the folder pane, right click on each folder in turn and if COMPACT enables, click it.

Outlook also has a compact feature (right click on the account top folder / data file properties / advanced / compact) however that is (AFAICT) only for the local email offline storage file - not the IMAP server file.

HTH?

[#10]

Hi Jeff, 

Would it help if we delete mail from that mailbox going back from a certain date?

[#11]

@Gandalf

If it’s not possible to reconcile the sizes reported via the email client software and the file store utilisation reports, then I would doubt it. Jeff suggests that there are not many emails and those which are there are significantly less than the file store utilisation report.

Here is a scenario worth examining.

The user “deleted” a massive volume of emails (they were moved to the trash folder) 10 plus days ago.

Shortly afterwards the utilisation report was generated reporting a sizeable mail account.

Standard weekly automated house keeping clears out the trash folder earlier than 7 days ago…

User gets around to addressing the utilisation report … but now cannot reconcile the figures.

Does a contemporary FILE STORE utilisation report correlate with the figures reported by Jeff from looking at webmail folder sizes? In other words are we chasing a ghost here created by time lags in the utilisation reporting process … other house keeping … and user action?

[#12]

PS: if my recollection is correct, utilisation reports are run late in week and trash folder clear out is run early hours of Sunday. Thus a report produced on Friday and for a user responding to it on Monday could mean they are looking at something quite different.

[#13]

Thanks!

@Townman - I've run a compact from the webmail, so it would be good now to see a new utilisation report to see if it's had an effect. The user associated with that mailbox only uses the POP3 versions of the emails (other than reading on phone) and rarely deletes directly from the server (letting the 14 day Outlook cleanup take effect). They go into Outlook daily, so there shouldn't be a huge spike in usage over time and I don't think there has been any unusually large emails in the last week or so. 

That being said, @Gandalf is it possible for a new utilisation report to be generated out of the usual schedule to check the points made by Townman?

Jeff

[#14]

Thanks for getting back to us @minkey

The utilisation reports are generated automatically and not something we can manually report.

Having said that I've raised a task to our NetOps team to re-check the size of the biggest mailbox on the last report. 

The system they'd check would be different to the one I emailed you the data from. 

I'll let you know once I've got a response from the team which should be within 3 working days but normally sooner.

[#15 · Accepted solution]

Hi @minkey

I've updated the support ticket on your account Here with the size of the biggest mailbox as of 08:08 today.

Let me know if you need further help.