What is a Quota and How Does it Affect Me?

Emails in the Trash folder count towards your quota!

Quotas are limits on the amount of disk space you are allowed to use on the email server.  This limit is set for files including the email you receive.  User limits are set at 30 megabytes.

What happens if you exceed your limit?

If you exceed the file limits and you are using BearMail, you will get the following error message or something like it: 

You will no longer be able to receive any new incoming emails until you account is back under quota.  The account can still be accessed and emails can still be sent out and old emails read. 

What can you do if you are over your quota?
Helpful hints to clean accounts:

Emails are able to be sorted by size so it can be easily seen which emails are taking up the most space.

Attachments are the biggest culprits of causing an email account to be over quota - save the attachments to your desktop and delete those emails.

As a precautionary measure, by default deleted emails will be placed in the Trash folder and a copy of all emails sent will be saved in in a user's Sent folder.  Empty Trash, Deleted, and Sent folders if you no longer need the emails they contain. 

To see what folders have messages and their sizes click on folders from the main page.  Emails in the Trash folder count towards your quota!

Below is an example of a user that has 29 MB in their trash folder.  Simply click Empty Trash and the email contained will be purged and it is gone. 

Again, it cannot be overly stressed how much space email attachments can take up. 20 emails with 1Mb attachments will take up as much space as 15,000 plain text emails. Bearmail is NOT meant to be used for file storage, it is meant for college related communications.
 
If you need assistance cleaning out your account or have any questions please call the UNC Technical Support Center and they can assist you. (970) 351-HELP.

Page Last Update:  11/10/2006