Guide to IMAP at MIT

Email at MIT

Managing Your Email Quota

What Is an Email Quota?

IS&T has established a quota for storage of email on MIT post office servers. Each user has a quota of 1 GB. Since by default, the IMAP protocol leaves mail on the server, you should check your quota periodically to make sure you are within limits. [certificates required]

If you reach 85% of your quota, you will receive an email message stating this. If you reach 90%, you will receive another email message. If you reach 100% quota, you will receive a message to that effect and you will no longer receive incoming messages until you remove messages from the post office server.

While you're at 100% quota, your incoming messages are held for you. If you remain at 100% quota for 3 days, after that time, your incoming messages will be returned to the senders until you reduce your quota.

What To Do if You Go Over Quota

If you receive a message saying that you are at 100% quota, you should immediately remove messages from the post office server. Once you've freed up some space, you will be able to receive incoming messages, however this might not be immediate. It may take anywhere from 15 minutes to a couple of hours before you begin to receive incoming email again.

Tips For Managing Your Quota

• Move email attachments you've received to your local machine or Athena directory and delete them from the post office server. Attachments can be large and take up space.
  
  
• Go through your messages stored on the post office server regularly and delete those you no longer need. You may want to devise an archiving strategy to make it easy to find messages that can be deleted. For example, create a "hold" mailbox (a.k.a. folder) that you examine on a regular basis and store messages in it that can be deleted at some point in the near future.
  
  
• If you have stored messages that you access infrequently, move them to your local machine and delete them off of the post office server.
  
  
• If you set up a mailbox to store copies of messages you've sent, be sure to go through it regularly to delete ones you don't need, or move them to your local machine for long-term storage.
  
  
• If you have a Trash mailbox (a.k.a. folder) on the post office server, make sure it's emptied regularly.
  
  
• Enable automated purging of the spamscreen folder after a certain number of days to keep your quota under control.