A Tale of Too Many Emails

Like to receive more of our hints and tips?

Sign up below.
Back to Blog posts

A Tale of Too Many Emails

Emails can be a pain! We all know that and it really is important to set yourself up some sort of process to purge your account every now and then.

For the second time this month, I have been approached by a client who had a Bigpond email account but they could no longer receive any emails. Why not? One of the bounce messages gave the reason away - (It's always worth reading a bounceback message if you ever receive one). In this case "this user account is temporarily over quota".

Okay - now what! Well, Bigpond allows a fairly reasonable 10GB per email account and I've since discovered this equates to around 70,000 emails! That's when you never delete and just keep letting emails fill up your account.

But 70,000!! Wow! Does one REALLY need to keep 70,000 emails going back to 2017 in their Inbox?? I would be inclined to suggest not.

Okay, so we head into Bigpond Webmail and start deleting from the oldest date forward. Well, this is going to be fun - you can only delete 50 emails at a time! What now?

Time to set up the customers email account on my system and using IMAP settings, download the whole 70,000 emails. I am currently up to about 4 hours and counting 🙂

From here I can delete a lot more than 50 emails at a time, which are then removed from the server. But it is not ideal to select and delete thousands at a time - The likes of Outlook comes down crashing! Ahhh!!! So it's a slow process.

Long story short - PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE maintain your own email inbox, delete/trash/destroy those you don't want, and save any email attachments out of your email account and onto your PC so they don't clog up your data level.

Create folders/labels within your Inbox and move emails daily, you want to keep, into those folders. Also daily, delete those you don't need and attempt to keep that Inbox empty.

I have a system that if there's an email in my Inbox, that item is yet to be attended to and once done, the email is moved to a folder or deleted. Zero Inbox!

The above is a standard Bigpond account of 10GB. If you are using your web server (same place as your website) to run your emails through, you very likely have a lot less data - 1, 2, 3 GB or similar and this fills up very quickly

Office 365 and Google Workspace are paid services but you can get 15GB, 30GB or even unlimited there - depending on what level you pay for.

But even if you're on 30GB and you top that out - that's huge and you really need to get your systems sorted out.

Good luck getting down to zero emails in your inbox!

Alternatively, contact us regarding migrating your emails over to the recommended Google Workspace.

Copyright © 2024

Miniwebs (TM)
linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram