Overview
This article describes how to adjust the email storage limit on your mail server. For information about sending quota limits, view the following article:
When changing/removing disk limits (quotas), it will take about 15 minutes for the changes to be pushed to the live servers.
If your account reaches/exceeds its disk limit, and you've made a change via the panel, you may want to contact support through a ticket or by starting a “Chat Live” session (using the Chat Live button on any page of the panel) and request if support can expedite the change for you.
Adjusting disk usage
To adjust disk usage for email messages:
- Navigate to the Manage Email page.
- Click the Edit link for a selected address.
- The email edit page appears:
- Either increase the value of the "Limit total disk usage" field or uncheck the MB box.
If you increase the disk limit, make sure that the "Email me daily warnings" option is checked so you or the user are notified if the limit is ever hit.
- Click the Save changes button to save your changes.
General consideration of the email storage limit
Whenever you create a new email user account, you’re given the option to limit the total disk usage. By default, this is set to 200MB. DreamHost recommends that if you do set a limit, raise that number if you're expecting to store/save a lot of mail through that new email address and leave it on DreamHost's servers (as opposed to downloading it off the server using a POP3 connection).
Total disk usage of 200 MB is usually a good amount for regular mail, but when it comes to HTML mail and attachments, you'll quickly reach that limit which causes errors until it's changed. If you set a limit and then later you need to change it or remove it entirely, you can do so by editing the email address on the Manage Email page.
DreamHost recommends that you never set an email account with a disk limit below 100MB as most email clients require some free space in order to operate (even to delete messages). If an email account reaches/exceeds its disk limit, it displays errors and bounces incoming messages. If that happens, you'll need to increase/remove the disk limit in order to get it working again.
However, DreamHost also does not recommend storing over 1000MB of mail as this could cause connection failures in Webmail when attempting to load your Inbox.
DreamHost mail servers allow incoming messages as large as 40MB, and a couple of large messages can easily fill your account very quickly if it has a very low disk limit. For more information on incoming message limitations, see the following article:
Backup up email messages
When you are reducing your email's disk usage, you may have old messages that you want to save. DreamHost recommends that you back up these messages locally on your computer. There are multiple backup methods you can use, but the easiest option is exporting the messages via your email client. See the following article for more information on backing up your email messages:
