Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 14 years 2 months 24 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
If you leave your mail on the server, then it will eventually fill up, and when people try to e-mail or reply, they’ll get “the mailbox is over quota” or something similar as a bounce-back message.
When that happens, you are going to have to either empty some of the mail, or increase the size of the mailbox, which would only be a temporary fix, until it fills up again. No matter what the device, cell phone or desktop, you have to change your email program behavior.
The default behavior of all e-mail programs is to remove mail from the server once it’s been downloaded. However, as more and more people want to receive mail in multiple places, they have changed their mail settings, and have even been told to do so by the telephone company’s tech support, and now they are having problems.
Here’s how to correct the root cause, but remember – you still have to go empty your mailbox at your host.
The screen shots and steps are for Outlook, but if you use any of a dozen other programs, on your computer or your phone, the concepts are always almost identical…
Go to Tools – account settings –
Then highlight the mailbox and hit the “change” button –
Hit the “more settings” button in the lower right”
Go to the Advanced tab and UNcheck the box that says “leave mail on server” (or at least set it to empty when your deleted items folder)
Don’t forget that if people are getting bounce messages now, you’re also going to have to login to your web hosting control panel, an empty out some of the mail that sitting there. Remember it’s not the number of e-mails that’s the problem, it’s generally the large file attachments that are filling you up past the quota that you have set for each mailbox.
I put this here as a quick reference for hosting clients but I hope it helps others…
