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"You
are over your quota on this email server and you won't get any
new mail until you do something about it!"
Have you received a threatening email message to this effect?
Deleting most (say ¾) of the messages in your incoming
and outgoing
mailboxes will solve this problem for a while. If you are not
ready to part
with your email messages, or need more time to decide which
ones to delete, you can transfer some of them off the server
to email folders located
locally on your computer. This article explains how to do this.
First, let's put this quota business in perspective. You have
25MB of space in your Barnard email account. A text-only email
containing ten lines is about 2KB to 3KB in size. If you attach
a file, say a fancy poster in PDF file which is 995KB, to the
same email, its size naturally shoots up to around 1000KB -
which is 1 MB. Additionally, emails written in HTML format are
much larger than the text only versions.
You could exceed your quota with anything from 1,000 to 10,000
emails - which include the messages in your outgoing mailboxes,
which may have names like "Sent", "sent-mail",
"sent-mail-August-1999" and so forth. If you regularly
receive a lot of mail, then you might easily go over your quota
quite often.
Deleting as much email as you can will help make it easier to
sort through what you have and decide what to do with it.
Go to http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/edtech/faqs/email/overquota.html
to
learn how to delete mail from the server and transfer mail from
the server
to local folders.
Sorting your email by size may make it easier to identify
older email messages to delete in both your incoming and outgoing
mail
folders. Do so in pine: open your inbox then type "$z"
(without the quotes); this will sort your email from smallest
to largest. Use the spacebar to scroll to the bottom of your
sorted email; the last one will be the ones that are the largest
in size. Repeat this process for your sent-mail folder.
Top Five Over-Quota Tips:
1)Empty your Trash by clicking the 'Purge' button (in Webmail)
2)Delete Attachments
3)Delete large emails
4)Save emails to your local hard drive
5)Delete your Sent Mail