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Over-allocation of email space

LJ Pritchard
Hi - I'm a noobie here. I have a client who has cPanel access and he has been merrily adding 'infinite' mailboxes to their 20GB account. In total they are only using around 12GB but am I correct in thinking that the problem with this is that the account could exceed 20GB eventually but with no warnings since each individual mailbox has been set to unlimited? And of course when this happens, all mail stops rather than an individual box that has exceeded its quota. Second question on this - If I change all the mailboxes to specific quotas, is there any way of seeing the total space that has actually been allocated to all the mailboxes as a percentage of the 20GB account. Thanks for your help!

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3 comments

Date Votes
  • cPanelMichael
    Hello, Yes, it's possible an email account with unlimited disk space could use up all of the available disk space available to the cPanel account. As far as the disk space usage, you can use the Set an overall quota for Email Ability to disable 'unlimited' email quotas Thank you.
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  • Jcats
    Hi - I'm a noobie here. I have a client who has cPanel access and he has been merrily adding 'infinite' mailboxes to their 20GB account. In total they are only using around 12GB but am I correct in thinking that the problem with this is that the account could exceed 20GB eventually but with no warnings since each individual mailbox has been set to unlimited? And of course when this happens, all mail stops rather than an individual box that has exceeded its quota.

    They can set each mailbox to unlimited, but they will still be limited to the limit set on the cPanel account itself which would be 20GB, they wouldn't be able to surpass the 20GB, if they did, then ALL email accounts will start rejecting emails saying the mailbox is full.
    Second question on this - If I change all the mailboxes to specific quotas, is there any way of seeing the total space that has actually been allocated to all the mailboxes as a percentage of the 20GB account.

    Simple answer would be no. You would just need to do the math from the list, otherwise you can try and create a script to pull the info from: UAPI Functions - Email::list_pops_with_disk - Software Development Kit - cPanel Documentation
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  • 24x7server
    Hi, Answer to Question 1) Yes, there will be no warning, as there is no quota set that will give you a soft warning of space exceeding, however, unlimited would still be restricted to the over all quota of the particular cPanel account, so it will not exceed the given cPanel quota, but then consequence would be seen like over quota will result in not able to access the cPanel interface due to quota exceeded. The receiving mails will fail and return with a bounce back stating the mail box is full.. Answer to Question 2) The total space a mail box is using can be seen directly in the email account creation section of the cPanel interface, where it shows a small bar graph for this (in %) for every account, which displays how much is the email account using the space..
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