I received a notice about my mailbox memory quota. How can I manage my account's usage?

Each mailbox in the Princeton-ma.us system is allocated a portion of the total available memory on the mail server.  The initial quota for each mailbox is set to 500Mb. If you reach your quota, your mailbox will reject new messages so it's important to pay attention to your usage.

IMPORTANT:  To clean up your inbox, you MUST use webmail access to your account. You cannot affect the overall usage solely by erasing messages from your smartphone.

If you use an E-mail client such as Outlook or Thunderbird, and have it properly setup, you won't need any more memory. If you use a browser to access your E-mail via princeton-ma.us/webmail, we have increased your quota to give you greater flexibility.

Here are some tips and suggestions to manage your usage:

On the mail server (webmail), if you have set the Spam Assassin level too high (a good value is 6) you may be filling up your mailbox with spam.

If you’re using webmail to access your messages, delete old messages to free up memory. You should do this regularly for your Inbox, your Sent folder and your Trash folder.

If you use Outlook, Thunderbird or another client to access your messages:

  • Make sure that the account settings are for POP3, not IMAP. Unfortunately, the default settings on some of these clients is IMAP and that must be changed to POP3.
  • Also, make sure that the client software is set to clean off messages on the mail server.

    In Outlook, go to Tools/Accounts, select your princeton-ma.us account and select Properties. Under the Advanced tab you'll see a check box under Delivery entitled "Leave a copy of messages on the server". This should  not be checked.

    If you prefer, you can set the number of days to keep the messages on the server to something reasonable. (This is a good strategy if you want to check your E-mail from a mobile device.)

 

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