Your Mail Server over the size limit in Thunderbird, here is what you need to do.
Mail Server over the size limit in Thunderbird
Every email service has a limit on how much data it can store. Services like Gmail offers a huge amount of space on their services (15GB per account), which means it’s very unlikely you’ll ever run out of space. However, the corporate servers usually have around 500MB or 1Gb the most in rare cases.
It’s very likely you will quickly run out of space in your Thunderbird client in work-space.
What to do then?
What if you cannot receive any new email because you have run out of space?
Well, the first obvious solution is to start deleting the old emails that are no longer relevant or that you no longer need.
But what if you do need all of them? In many cases, the work related emails remain relevant forever, lest you want to lose important client details or something like that. (More on this below.)
The solution below will help you regarding that. But first, here’s how to find out how much space are you allowed in your servers if you are using an IMAP account: Right click on your inbox folder or ctrl+click, select ‘Properties’ and then select “Quota” tab. If you are using a corporate server, you might want to confirm it by asking your administrator.
Third-Party Add-Ons
You can also use third-party Thunderbird add-ons to know about your allowed space. Add-ons like “Display Quota” can help you. This is one of the best things about Thunderbird that can you extend its functionality a lot by installing third-parties plugins or add-ons.
So, if you have decided to get rid of your emails, it’s better to sort emails and the folders according to their size. For that you need to install ‘Mail Summaries’ to get to know the folder size. You can then start deleting the folders that are very large. Same thing can be done with individual emails through an add-on called “Message List Columns”.
Another help tip is to remove the attachments from the emails. Because generally emails don’t take more than few Kbs of space, but the files attached with them can be large and can be responsible for your flowing inbox. Start getting rid of large attachments.
And lastly, the best way to deal with the mail servers that are over their allowed size quota is to archive the data locally and to remove them from server. This way you get to keep your emails, as well as, free up space from the servers.
Keep in mind that the ‘Archive’ folder in Thunderbird doesn’t really remove emails from servers. It just moves them into the ‘Archive’ folder that is still located within the servers. To actually free up the space, you need to move your emails into a local ‘Archive’ folder.
To change the location of your ‘Archive’ folder from server-based to local, do this:
- Go to ‘ToolsEdit’ –> Account Settings
- Select the email account that you are using and then select “Copies and Folders”
- Go to “Messages Archives” and use the settings in “Keep messages archives in” to change it to a local folder.
Archiving your emails to a local account instead of servers keep the data archived if you want to use them in future, thus helping you save space on servers.
Another helpful thing you can do is export the archived folder to a single file that you can keep on your computer indefinitely until you want to use the data again. You just have to import the file back into Thunderbird.
There are many ways to do that using add-ons like “ImportExportTools“. This add-on can let you export your emails from one folder (and the sub-folders) to a single MBOX file. Or you can also export all emails messages into individual EML, HTML, text, PDF, or CSV files.