How to Check and Increase Your Email Account's Storage Quota

Every email account on your hosting plan has a storage quota, a limit on how much mail (including attachments) it can hold. Once a mailbox fills up, new messages sent to it start bouncing back to the sender instead of arriving in your inbox. Checking your usage regularly and increasing the quota when needed keeps your business email running without interruption.

How to Check Your Current Mailbox Usage

In cPanel

1. Log in to your hosting control panel and open Email Accounts under the Email section.
2. Find the email address you want to check in the list.
3. Look at the Usage column, it shows how much space that mailbox is currently using out of its total quota.

In DirectAdmin

1. Log in to your hosting control panel and open E-Mail Accounts under the Email menu.
2. Each email address in the list shows its current usage next to its assigned quota.
3. Click on an individual account for a more detailed breakdown if you need it.

How to Increase the Storage Quota

In cPanel

1. Go to Email Accounts.
2. Find the account you want to adjust and click Manage (or the three-dot menu next to it, depending on your cPanel theme).
3. Under Mailbox Quota, select a new value or choose Unlimited if your hosting plan allows it.
4. Click Update Email Settings to save.

In DirectAdmin

1. Go to E-Mail Accounts.
2. Click on the email address you want to change, or select it and choose Modify.
3. Update the Quota field with the new size in megabytes, or set it to 0 for unlimited if your plan supports it.
4. Click Save to apply the change.

A mailbox quota can only be increased up to the total disk space allocated to your hosting account. If you're already close to your account's overall limit, increasing one mailbox's quota may mean reducing another's, or upgrading your hosting plan.

If You Can't Free Up More Space

If increasing the quota isn't an option because your hosting account is near its overall disk space limit, you have a few alternatives:

• Delete old emails with large attachments, or archive them locally using an email client instead of leaving them on the server.
• Empty the mailbox's Trash and Junk folders, which still count toward your quota.
• Set up an email client with POP3 instead of IMAP so messages download to your device and are removed from the server (only suitable if you check mail from one device).

For more on how your overall hosting plan's disk space is allocated across email, files, and databases, see Understanding Your Hosting Account: Disk Space and Bandwidth Limits.