Managing the storage space for an email account

Objective

Every OVHcloud email account has a dedicated storage space. By managing your storage space properly, you can avoid it becoming full, also known as “overquota”. By default, the emails you receive and send are stored on the server of your email account. You can also store your emails locally on your computer using an email client (Outlook, macOS Mail, Thunderbird, etc.).

This guide explains how to manage and optimise the storage space of email accounts.

Requirements

• A preconfigured OVHcloud email solution:
  • MX Plan available with a web hosting plan, or included in a 100M free hosting.
  • Exchange.
  • Email Pro.
  • Zimbra.
• Login credentials for the email account concerned

---

OVHcloud Control Panel Access

MX Plan:

• Direct link: MX Plan
• Navigation path: Web Cloud > MX Plan > Select your MX Plan service

Email Pro:

• Direct link: Email Pro
• Navigation path: Web Cloud > Email Pro > Select your platform

Exchange:

• Direct link: Exchange
• Navigation path: Web Cloud > Exchange > Select your platform

---

Instructions

The storage space management for your email account will be broken down into 3 steps in this guide. They can be done in order or independently, depending on your need.

• Check the current quota for your email account. In this step, you can evaluate your current resource usage, for the next 2 steps.
• Optimise your email account. In this step, you will find tips that will help you maintain a storage space without any extra elements.
• Archive or Change email offer. If the previous step is not enough, you will find the information you need to set up a local archive space (on your computer) for your emails via your email software. You will also find the information you need to change your account’s email solution to an offer with more storage space.

1. Check your email account quota

You can do this via the OVHcloud Control Panel if you are managing the email service concerned, or via webmail if you are the sole user of the email account.

From the Control Panel

In the OVHcloud Control Panel, go to the Web Cloud section, then follow the instructions for your solution:

From webmail

Go to the page Webmail and enter the login information for your email account. Select the webmail client of your solution below:

2. Optimise your email account

If your email account is full, you will no longer be able to receive emails.
When a person sends you an email, they receive an error message in the form of an automatic reply, such as "552, 5.2.2". The email account to which you sent a message has exhausted its quota.".
When your email account is full, you can still send emails. However, these emails cannot be stored in your "sent messages" folder.

Optimise the space allocated to your email account

Before you perform any other operation on your email account, you will need to familiarise yourself with the content of your email account, in order to remove any unnecessary elements. Please check some of them:

• 1 Deleted items (Trash): It contains the items you have deleted. To avoid cumulating emails in this folder, we recommend emptying the trash regularly.
• 2 Sent items: When you send an email to a recipient, a copy of this email is stored in the “Sent items” folder. We recommend that you regularly purge this folder or archive its contents, locally on your computer or remotely on a cloud storage space.
• 3 Stored emails containing large attachments: Emails with attachments take up more space on your email account. We recommend storing large items locally on your computer or remotely on a cloud storage space.
• 4Folder organisation: When you have a lot of folders on your email account, it is harder to keep track of the used space on your email account. Take regular inventory of your folders and their contents.

Increase the capacity of your email account

You can increase the storage capacity of your email account, if it has not reached its maximum capacity. Below, you will find the approach to follow, depending on your solution:

3. Archive emails or change your email solution

Archive your emails locally on your computer

When you set up your email address on your email client in IMAP, the visible content by default, corresponds to what is synced on the email server. This means that the emails are loaded on your computer but disappear if they are deleted from the server. To archive them to your computer, you must configure your email software.

If you want, you can free the storage space of your email account by storing your emails directly on your computer. To do this, you will need to use an email client installed on your computer.

The role of email software is to convert your emails into files, so that they can be stored on your computer. However, you will need to configure your email software’s archive feature. The emails will then be stored in a local folder and not directly on the server of your email account.

Below is a nonexhaustive list of configuration guides for email clients on computers, depending on the solution you have:

• IMAP protocol on the MX Plan and Email Pro offers
• MAPI protocol on the Exchange offer for Windows Outlook
• EWS protocol on the Exchange offer for macOS Outlook

Once you have installed your email software, follow the instructions below to prepare the archive folder.

Change your email solution to increase capacity

Select the current solution for your email account from the menu below:

Go further

Migrating an MX Plan email account to Email Pro or Exchange

Manually migrate your email account

Migrating your email account from one OVHcloud email platform to another

If you would like assistance using and configuring your OVHcloud solutions, please refer to our support offers.

Join our community of users.