What is a QUOTA?

A quota is the amount of space allocated on a server to an individual account.

What is MY quota?

There are actually TWO quotas for every email account.  The first one is on the special file call the INBOX.  The quota on the INBOX folder is 17.58MB.  The other quota is on all of the OTHER folders in your email account (if you have any).  The quota for all of the other folders combined is 39MB.

Why do we have a quota?

The space on the email server is limited. 

What is the capacity of the server?

The space on the ACC email server is approximately 229GB.  If everyone were to go OVER their quota at the same time, we would probably fill up the space on the server.  Our Systems Group would appreciate it if we didn’t try that.

I clean out my mailbox regularly…how can I be over quota?

There are several possible answers for this one.  First and foremost, we’re talking about the amount of SPACE that you’re taking on the SERVER.  The mail on your LOCAL MACHINE does not affect your quota.  You could delete all of the mail from your local machine and still be over your quota on the SERVER.  Second, it’s not the NUMBER of email messages that you have but the total SIZE of the folder or folders that matters.  Third, it may be that you’ve received a number of large messages in the past few days and you’ve got your local machine set to “Leave mail on Server for XXX days”.  There are valid reasons for leaving your mail on the server for a few days; you may want to consider reducing the number of days so that you stay under the quota.

What happens when I go over my quota?

That depends on which quota you go over.  If you go over the quota on your INBOX, then the mail server will send a “rejection notice” to the sender of the message telling them that their message could not be delivered.  Specifically, they would get a “5.5.0 Can’t create output” message back from the server.  If you go over your quota for your folder collection then you might experience problems sending mail or moving messages from your INBOX into your folders.

Back to Top

What’s the largest email message that I can send or receive?

Any email message over 5.5 million bytes will be rejected.  That’s the size of the message itself along with any attachment.  Please remember that an attachment must be ENCODED when it’s sent over email.  Because of that encoding, a good rule of thumb would be to limit your email message to about 4MB worth of attachments (at the most).

How many emails can I keep in my INBOX on the SERVER?

That depends on the SIZE of those email messages.  If you only had a single page of text in each message (approximately 2KB each), you could have approximately 9000 messages on the server before going over quota.  On the other hand, if someone were to send you 4 emails with home movies of their new puppy (4.5MB for each message), that right there could put you over your quota.

How can I check on the size of my INBOX and other folders?

The easiest way to check your quota is with WEBMAIL.  The URL for WEBMAIL is: https://webmail.austincc.edu

Once you sign in to WEBMAIL, click on MAIL and then FOLDER MANAGEMENT and then FOLDER OVERVIEW.  After just a little bit of waiting, you will see a listing of all your folders and their size.  There is a TOTAL at the bottom of the list.  Remember that your INBOX is limited to 18MB and the rest of the folders combined need to be less than 39MB.  If you subtract your INBOX size from the TOTAL, you’ll see what you have in the rest of your folders.

What should I do if I’m over my quota?

If you’re over your quota, you need to delete mail messages from the SERVER.  Deleting mail from your LOCAL MACHINE doesn’t help at all.  Often times, deleting just 3 or 4 messages will be enough to get you back under your quota.  Using WEBMAIL, you can go to your INBOX and then click on the word “SIZE” at the top of the right-most column.  That will re-sort your INBOX by the SIZE of the message.  After you delete the messages, make sure that you click on the link to “Empty Trash”.

I clicked on the link to “Empty Trash” and nothing happened!

This may mean that you don’t have a Trash folder and it may be something else.  The easiest thing to do in this case is to set your Mail Preferences in WEBMAIL to Delete and Expunge Simultaneously”.  To do that, go to PREFS and then check off that selection.  Remember to click on the button at the bottom of the PREFERENCES screen to “Update Preferences”.  Now try deleting those huge messages again and see if that works.

Back to Top