Increasing email storage quotas

Each email account has a storage quota — once full, no new messages arrive (senders get bounced). You can increase a quota anytime, up to your plan's total limit.

Change a quota

1. Go to Services → click your hosting → Email tile.
2. Find the account in the list.
3. Click Manage (or the account itself).
4. Find the storage quota field.
5. Set a new value.
6. Save.

The change is immediate. Quota is in MB or GB; pick what fits the account's needs.

How quotas relate to total storage

Email quotas count toward your hosting plan's total disk usage:

• A 5GB quota on info@ reserves 5GB of your total disk space.
• If you have multiple email accounts, total their quotas equals total reserved.
• This counts alongside your website files, databases, and backups.

If your hosting has 50GB total disk and you allocate 30GB across email accounts, only 20GB remains for everything else.

"Unlimited" quotas

Most plans allow setting individual mailbox quotas to "Unlimited," meaning the mailbox can grow until it hits your hosting plan's overall disk limit.

Useful for:

• Personal you@ accounts where usage is hard to predict.
• Catch-all addresses that receive variable volume.

Less useful when:

• You have many accounts and want to enforce per-user limits.
• One account's runaway growth could starve others.

For team setups, explicit quotas per account work better than unlimited.

When you're approaching a limit

If a mailbox is filling up:

1. Increase the quota — easiest fix if you have hosting headroom.
2. Archive old messages locally — IMAP clients (Apple Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird) can move old messages to local storage, freeing server space.
3. Delete unwanted messages — bulk delete spam, old promos, etc.
4. Empty Trash and Spam folders — these still count toward quota until cleared.

"Quota exceeded" bounces

When a mailbox is full, incoming messages bounce back to senders with "quota exceeded" or "mailbox full" errors. The sender sees a non-delivery report; the message isn't lost forever from their side, but it didn't arrive at yours.

To recover:

1. Increase the quota.
2. Or clear space (see above).
3. Ask senders who bounced to resend (they don't auto-retry past a brief retry window).

If you're chronically hitting limits, raise the quota permanently and monitor occasionally.

Tracking usage

The Email tile shows current usage vs quota for each account. Sort by usage to spot which mailboxes are growing fastest.

For automated alerting, our system emails you when an account crosses 90% of its quota. Manage notification preferences in Account → Profile.

Plan-level limits

How much total disk space is available for email depends on your plan:

• Most shared/WordPress plans: 10–100GB total disk, shared between files, databases, and email.
• VPS: whatever your VPS's disk has.

If you're routinely full across all storage types, consider upgrading to a plan with more.

Mass-mail considerations

If you're using your hosting email for newsletters, transactional notifications, or any high-volume sending:

• Outgoing-only quotas are different from inbox quotas. Hosting plans typically cap outgoing mail per hour or per day.
• Hitting outgoing limits looks like emails sit in "Sent" without arriving at recipients.

For high-volume outgoing, use a transactional email service (Postmark, SendGrid, Mailgun) — see Email deliverability.