Mailbox Full and Near Full Warnings

Last modified: Friday, March 16, 2007

A "mailbox full" error message is returned to a sender of email to your server when that email item would cause the final destination mailbox to exceed its configured diskspace quota, or if the acceptance of the email would cause the total diskspace allocated to your server to be exceeded.

Additionally, when it detects a problem, cPanel will send advanced "full or very close to full" warning messages to the domain administrator via the email address recorded in cPanel's Contact Information field.

To correct the situation, you need to perform one or more of the following actions...

• Clean up email account mailboxes by emptying old email items including sent and archived items.
• If you have the spamassassin spam box enabled, check and empty all related spam items held on your server.
• Ensure that the quota you have set for each of your individual email accounts is suitable for your requirements.
• If you have redundant email accounts created with the same name as email forwarders, delete the email accounts entirely.
• User your local FTP client, or the File Manager built into your cPanel, to clean up any redundant files residing in the folders of your server.
• In the unlikely event that the above steps have not freed up sufficient diskspace, request an upgrade of your current hosting account.

For further background information, please also refer to the knowledge base articles related to creating email accounts and creating email forwarders.