Overview

All Conetix hosting plans come with a limit on how much storage space your plan is allowed to use. This Storage Limit is determined by the type of plan you have, and can be increased via the use of Storage Addons if needed.

Once you hit your hosting plan’s Storage Limit, you will be asked to either add more space to your plan (via paid Storage Addons), or to free up sufficient space to get yourself back within your Storage Limits.

One of the most frequent causes for excessive storage usage is unchecked IMAP email accounts that have neglected to delete old or large emails, resulting in the mailboxes growing to excessive sizes and then requiring a lot of work to get them back down to reasonable sizes.

This article will guide you through the basic steps involved in cleaning up an email account of its largest emails, to reduce its storage usage.

Warning

This article steps you through the process of permanently deleting emails.
Ensure you have made a backup of your emails before proceeding.

Instructions

Advice

This article focuses on modern versions of Outlook, however the general steps can be applied to most modern email applications.

  1. Open your Inbox folder.
how to free up hosting space by deleting emails
  1. Under the View tab, Change View to the “Preview” option so that you can see the Size column.
how to free up hosting space by deleting emails
  1. Click the Sorting Options dropdown, and choose to sort “By Size“, in Descending order (so that the largest emails are shown at the top).
how to free up hosting space by deleting emails
  1. Locate the largest emails in the folder – these will usually have attachments on them.
    Anything over 5MB in size can likely be considered for deletion, however you must identify whether you will require that email anymore or not.
how to free up hosting space by deleting emails
  1. Once you have identified a large email that you no longer require, delete the email and proceed to the next.
how to free up hosting space by deleting emails
  1. Once there are no further emails in the current folder that you’re able to delete, proceed through the rest of your account’s folders and repeat Steps 2 – 5 as applicable.
  2. Once you have deleted any applicable emails, you will then need to empty them from your Deleted Items / Trash folder before they are actually deleted from the server.
    Right-click your Deleted Items folder, and choose “Empty Folder“.
how to free up hosting space by deleting emails
  1. You can then check your mailbox’s storage usage within Plesk by following the steps in our article on managing Mailbox Disk Space Usage.
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