If you are receiving emails titled "" there is a good chance your email box is almost full. If your mailbox reaches full capacity, messages sent to you will be returned to the sender. Think of the mailbox on the server as your mailbox at a post office. Eventually, if you never remove the mail out of your mailbox, there won't be any room to stuff the new mail coming in. Sure you can read your mail at the post office, and then put the mail back in your box, but eventually you'll have the problem of a full mailbox. The solution is to take the mail home and store it at home, not in your mailbox at the post office.
If this is your situation, then you have 2 choices on how to handle this.
- Use the webmail to delete emails out of your mailbox on the server.
Login to webmail
Note: If your mailbox is already full, you will need to disable the "" settings that protect you from accidentally deleting emails. You can find these in the settings. Click the three bars in the upper right corner of the webmail to open "". Under "" you will see the "" on the "" tab. Uncheck the two trash options which are "" and "". If you do not do this step, you won't be able to delete emails because there is no room to move the emails to the trash folder.
You can choose to delete specific emails, or purge your entire inbox if you already have it saved (see below).
- To purge your entire inbox. Right-click on the Inbox and choose "Purge Inbox".
- To delete specific emails. This is self-explanatory for the most part, but if you want to see which emails are taking up the most space, click on "" and choose "". By default the window only shows 50 emails so take note of whether you are viewing the smallest emails or the largest. You can go back and forth from the beginning of the list to the end using the arrows at the bottom of the email list column.
- To purge your entire inbox. Right-click on the Inbox and choose "Purge Inbox".
- Use an email client to download and remove messages from the server after retrieving them. (our recommended long-term solution)
You may already be using an email client such as Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, eM Client, Windows Live Mail, or Apple Mail but perhaps you don't have it set to remove the emails from the server or you have it configured via IMAP. Email clients can be configured as IMAP or POP3. Think of IMAP as being able to look into your mailbox remotely and read your mail but never removing it from the mailbox. POP3 is more like taking your mail home with you. That being said, we suggest the following setup for your email to insure you protect your email history.
- Choose a computer to be your "master" computer which will keep all your emails from the beginning of time and setup an email client on this computer using POP3. Configure the account within your client to leave messages on the server for a period of 3-6 months. Use this client to regularly check your email so that this computer always has a copy of your emails. This will put copies of your email under your control, and not just us. This is the same advice for any user with any email address even the free email services. If you want to make sure you'll always have your emails, do this.
- Next, all other devices such as phones, tablets, etc use IMAP to check your email. Since IMAP interacts with the server, you'll always have access to those 3-6 months of past emails via any device so long as you use IMAP. If you only use IMAP on everything, you will be visiting this page again because your mailbox will be full.
- Finally, setup a backup system on your "master" computer to regularly make backups of your historical emails. If you really want to get serious about backups, back them up in 2 places. Back them up to a separate hard drive and then back them up to a cloud backup service as well.
We understand the previous three points we mentioned can be a technical challenge to many people. You can find help with configuring your specific email client here. Just login and follow the instructions. We do not give technical support on backing up your computer. However, we can't stress the importance of backing up. Stuff fails, it just happens. We suggest you employ your favorite computer savvy person/friend/relative with some fresh baked cookies to follow our three points. They'll know what to do by reading them.
Once you have setup these things above, and regularly check your email on your master computer, you'll never have to worry about a full mailbox again.
