Mailbox capacity

[#1]

Hi, 

My mother is over 80, and not very tech-literate. She has received a message to say that she has "now used more than 75% of your mailbox capacity, and you need to take action to reduce the size of your mailbox."

I cannot currently enter her house to help her because of Covid-19.

Please can you tell me whether she can increase her 1GB allowance? It seems incredibly low compared to, say, gmail which gives 15GB, but she does not want to change her email address.

My mother is profoundly deaf and therefore relies on email for all communication.

Thank you for any help that anyone can offer.

Clare

[#2]

Perhaps when restrictions lift, you should swap her to POP3 from, presumably IMAP set up?
She's then in charge of her own storage.

[#3]

Can you explain about POP and IMAP, please?

Many thanks

[#4]

@hollyville  Here you go Its one reason why your inbox fills up. Me? I go with other free email providers for email addresses to give out for stuff like when I do online shopping etc. More the merrier.

[#5]

Thank you for the suggestion, I will try that when I can go into her house again. But would the limit still be set at 1GB? Is there any way to get more?

[#6]

Hi Clare, thanks for your post and sorry for the delayed staff response.

I'm afraid it's not possible for us to increase the mailbox capacity beyond 1GB. We're primarily a phone, broadband, mobile and TV provider with email being a value added service.

I'd recommend she (or you with her permission) logs into webmail at http://webmail.plus.net to delete some emails she may not need. If she wants to keep the majority it may be worth looking at the suggestions of changing how her email program such as Outlook, Thunderbird etc retrieves the mail. By using POP3 this should download them to her device.

There's some info on how to do this over Here. Let us know if you need any further help

[#7]

I've been trying to change to POP3 on my main account - and can still send mail, but received mail  is arriving on the server but no longer downloading from the server to my windows 10 mail! Mail I delete from my device is not deleting from the server, 

Any help gratefully received - thank you!

[#8]

There are very differing opinions around this space.  POP3 is often NOT the right answer.  Generally we are all exceedingly poor at managing the contents of our mailboxes...

1. We do not delete marketing junk
2. We share photos via email, never deleting the SENT version of the email, nor saving the attached photo on a received email and then delete that email
3. After deleting emails we forget to empty the deleted items folder
4. We never think of managing our own archiving of emails - saving essential older emails somewhere safe

For those less technically savvy, using POP3 places ALL of the responsibility for backing up email history on the end user.  So long as you adopt some simple house keeping and stay within the fair usage policy 1GB will be fairly adequate for the majority of users ... but some discipline is needed.

Also note that if you want to use the same mailbox on your PC and a phone and / or tablet the use of POP3 on anyone device can cause a lot of practical issues and confusion.  IMAP + Discipline + self responsibility for archiving and back up is a better formula.  To be safe with POP3 you MUST have a sound back up practice for your PC.

[#9]

Thank you very much to everyone for the hugely helpful replies. I now understand the difference between the POP3 and IMAP options so that I can discuss this with my mother. I'm inclined to agree with Townman that the best approach is for her to get into the habit of deleting emails with photos and junk, and just keep the essential ones.

Clare