Using the Email Account Diagnostics Quota Tool -- Finding Largest Files and Messages

You don't have to wait until you get a warning email message from us to check how much mail you have on the icarus or tigger (or on mailserv); you can check yourself. There are two ways to do this:

• Using ACCC Email Account Diagnostics Tool Web page. The advantage to using the Email Account Diagnostics Web page is that it allows you to download or delete entire email folders if you wish.
• Via WebMail. The advantage of using WebMail to get email folder and email message size information is that it also allows you to delete individual email messages.

These pages discribe the use of ACCC Email Account Diagnostics. Unless you know that you want to download entire mailboxes (or files on icarus or tigger) -- and that can be a very good idea -- you might be better off using WebMail.

Note on mail folders and mailboxes: Some email programs and tools talk about "mail folders" and others talk about "email mailboxes" -- they are exactly the same thing. We use "mailboxes" on this Web page because that's what Eudora calls them. (Even though the Quota page uses folder.)

1. Go to the ACCC Web home page, http://www.accc.uic.edu/
2. Click the purple Email button.
3. Select Email - Quota Tool .
4. Login with Bluestem, entering your UIC netid and ACCC common password.
5. This opens the Email Account Diagnostics page.

The figures below show fairly typical Email Account Diagnostics pages for Ada Byron Lovelace. She has accounts on icarus, tigger, and mailserv. The quotas for tigger and icarus are the same, so the output for icarus and tigger accounts are the same. Mailserv is only for email, so it has different quotas and different output.

• Figure 1 is an Email Account Diagnostics Main Menu.
• Figure 2 is for icarus and tigger: the 10 largest email messages that Ada has in her (tigger) Inbox. (The icarus Inbox listing would look the same.)
• Figure 3 is for icarus and tigger: the 10 largest files that Ada has in her (tigger) account, listed by total size, giving her a chance to download and /or delete them. (Again an icarus listing would look the same.)
• Figure 4 is for mailserv: View/Download/Delete email folders, lists all your email mailboxes, ranked by size.

The Email Account Diagnostics Main Menu lists all accounts that you have. Ada has an account on all three servers, icarus, mailserv, and tigger, so Email Account Diagnostics lists the statistics for all three accounts of her accounts, but only mailserv and tigger are shown in the figures.

Mailserv does only email and there is only one quota, which applies to your Inbox and to any other email mailboxes you keep on the server.

Icarus and tigger do email and all other server tasks, so they have two sets of two quotas: an Inbox quota set that applies to the email in your email Inbox (and only the Inbox), and a disk quota that applies to all other files you have on the server, including IMAP mailboxes other than the Inbox and your personal Web pages. The sets of quotas are comprised of soft and hard quotas.

• The soft quota is the smaller quota; it represents space available to you in the long term. You can go over your soft quota for a short while -- seven days. If you stay above your soft quota for seven days or more, new incoming email will be returned to its sender. The Quota given in Email Account Diagnostics for icarus and tigger is your soft quota, because it is the quota you must be below for the long term.
• The hard quota is the larger quota. The server will not allow you to go over your hard quota. When/if you reach your hard quota, new incoming email will be returned to its sender.
  

For each account, there are four things returned:

• Quota
• Usage
• Actions
• Comments
  
  

Quota and Usage:

• For icarus and tigger, there are two Quotas and Usages:
  • Your Inbox quota, and Usage is the size of your Inbox
  • Your disk space quota, and Usage is the space that all your files other than your Inbox take up.
• For mailserv, there is only email, so there is only one Quota, however, in Usage Email Account Diagnostics gives separate info for:
  • Current Inbox Usage
  • Combined Size of Other Email Folders
  • And then adds them together to get the percentage of the total spac on mailserv that you're using.
    
    
• Pay attention to the %Usage, because as the percentage gets closer to 100%, you're getting closer to getting your new incoming email being bounced.

Comments:

• For all three -- icarus, tigger, and mailserv, Comments:
  • The tool tells you when you last checked email and what protocol you used at that time.
  • Note that in with the mail checked information, it either says "pop" or "imap". That is the email protocol you used the last time you checked email on that account. It only tells you what you used most recently; you might have used the other sometime before that.
  • Following that, Email Account Diagnostics will have something if it finds something wrong with or interesting about your email account. If there is a problem, it will offer to fix it for you; you will have to click on a link if you want to fix a problem.
    • For example, for Ada's tigger account, it says: Messages addresses to adabyron@tigger.uic.edu are automatically forwarded to adabyron@mailserv.uic.edu.

Actions:

• For all three -- icarus, tigger, and mailserv, Actions:
• Click on download INBOX to download your Inbox to your personal computer.
• Click on delete INBOX to delete your Inbox. Be careful with this one; there usually isn't anyway to reverse this.
• Click on a View 10 largest INBOX Messages link on this page to get details on the largest messages, but you won't be able to look at them or delete them. (There are links to pages with step-by-step instructions on how to delete individual messages in "What if the short answers don't work?" in Managing Your icarus Email Account, Managing Your tigger Email Account, or Managing Your mailserv Email Account.)
  
• For icarus and tigger:
  • Click on Download/Delete 10 largest files in Personal Disk Space to get details on your largest "files" (including email mailboxes), and to allow you to download or delete them if you want to.
  • If you've received a quota warning email message (see Managing Your icarus Email Account or Managing Your tigger Email Account), the View the ten largest Inbox messages link is useful. See figure 2.
    
• For mailserv:
• Click on View/Download/Delete Email Folders to download and/or delete entire email mailboxes. See Downloading or Deleting Entire Mailboxes for instructions on how to use these functions.

Click on the view 10 largest Inbox messages in Actions on the Main Menu. If these 10 messages are very large, finding and deleting them might be all you need to fix your Inbox quota problems. This just lists the messages; you have to use your usual email program to delete them. There are links to pages with step-by-step instructions on how to delete individual messages in "What if the short answers don't work?" in Managing Your icarus Email Account or Managing Your tigger Email Account.

This function is also for icarus and tigger, which have a separate personal disk space quota for all disk space used other than that used for your email inbox.

The download/delete 10 largest files in your disk space link on the Main Menu gives you a list like the one in Figure 3. This page gives you the option to download or delete the 10 largest files you have on your account.

For Ada's tigger account, it turns out that several largest files are email mailboxes (you can tell because they are in the /mail/ directory and the Type is E-mail), but if you have personal Web pages on tigger or icarus, you might find that some of your largest files are your Web pages. (If you download email mailboxes, see Downloading or Deleting Entire Mailboxes for instructions on how to use these them after you download them.)

If these files are Web pages and you don't have enough space for both your Web pages and your online email mailboxes, your best bet is to move your email account to mailserv. It's open to everyone, and has a much higher quota. And since a mailserv account is only used for email, there's nothing to compete with your email for online storage. For more information on moving to mailserv, see the Mailserv FAQ.

For icarus and tigger accounts, this list is useful in keeping your account under you disk quota. (Disk space quota in figure 1.) It can be very helpful if you normally use POP but have on occasion used WebMail as well. In that cause, you might have IMAP mailboxes such as sent-mail and deleted that you don't know about.

This function is only for mailserv. It is similar to the functions for icarus and tigger, but it also allows you to see a list of the messages you have it each mailbox (Figure 5). It also lists all the mailboxes you have on mailserv, not the 10 largest.

• Click on view 10 largest messages to see a list of the messages in a mailbox, sorted by decreasing size (Figure 5).
• Click on download to download the mailbox; Click on delete mailbox to delete it. See Downloading or Deleting Entire Mailboxes for instructions on how to use these functions.

This lists the 10 largest messages in the selected mailbox, in decreasing order by size. You can't view or delete them here. There are links to pages with step-by-step instructions on how to delete individual messages in "What if the short answers don't work?" in Managing Your mailserv Email Account.