You are reading this article because you have exceeded (or about to) your mailbox allowance of 25GB and can no longer receive emails.
We offer a very generous mailbox limit of 25GB per mailbox which for most scenarios is more than enough, however, if you have been using email for several years and are in the habit of storing large emails, then over time this can use up your mailbox quota, the result being that people sending you emails will be "hard bounced".
| NOTE: Email is NOT a file storage system; it's primarily a text communication tool. It's bad practice to send large attachments, ie anything over 1mb, via email. Current technology does not feasibly allow for unlimited email storage so we recommend that if you need to send large files, send a link to a file through a third-party service such as wetransfer, dropbox or Google Drive. |
Essentially, you have three options for the dilemma of a full Rackspace Mail mailbox.
1. DIY OPTION (Free)
2. Archive Account Creation (€4.50 a month*)
3. Custom Archive Account Management (€4.50 a month* + one of charge of €150**)
* The €4.50 a month is the monthly fee for the license for the secondary archive account
** The one-off charge is for the time we spend setting up and manually moving emails between your accounts.
Solution 1 - The DIY option (Free)
This option is ideal for those users who don't mind losing older emails.
Log in to webmail and simply start removing emails*, especially large ones, from the offending mailbox or delete old emails and keep recent ones. The usual suspect is the SENT items, just go into webmail and sort the files by size and start deleting the large ones.
PROS: Space is immediately freed up on your main account.
PROS: There is no interruption to your email.
CONS: You permanently lose access to the email you deleted.
*In the case you cannot access webmail as the account is too full, we can log in and start purging items for you.
Solution 2 - Archive Account Creation (€4.50 per month)
This option is ideal for those users who need access to their old emails but don't mind starting with an empty mailbox.
(Let's assume the full mailbox is called: info@mydomain.com)
1. We rename the full mailbox, info@mydomain.com, to info.archive@mydomain.com (note the addition of .archive to the name)
2. We create a new mailbox account called info@mydomain.com
3. We send you new login details for both accounts.
PROS: Space is immediately freed up on your main account.
PROS: You have access to older emails through the archive account.
CONS: Your main account will be empty; it's a brand-new account.
CONS: Any previous folder structure you had on the main account is gone.
CONS: Any synced devices, like phones, desktops, will resync and appear empty.
CONS: If you set up the archive account on your devices, you have to resync the mail.
Solution 3 - Archive Account + Management (€4.50 per month + one off fee of €150)
(Let's assume the full mailbox is called: info@mydomain.com)
1. We create a brand new mail account on Rackspace Mail called info.archive@mydomain.com.
2. We manually set up two email accounts within the Thunderbird email client on our dedicated "transfer" server, info@mydomain.com and info.archive@mydomain.com.
3. We move any Large sent items from your sent items folder over to the info.archive@mydomain.com account to start freeing space.
4. We wait 6-12 hours for the info@mydomain.com to populate/sync with the mail server.
5. We enter the sent items folder and move any email over 10MB, and move those over to the sent items in info.archive@mydomain.com
6. After that, we create a "search filter" to view any historical emails by year. For example, we will move any email from 2023 to a folder called 2023 on the info.archive@mydomain.com
PROS: Space is immediately freed up on your main account.
PROS: You have access to older emails through the archive account, ie you don't lose any emails.
PROS: You retain any folder structure on your main account.
CONS: If you set up the archive account on your devices, you have to resync the mail.
Article last updated on 18/4/2025
