Introduction

To create a stable shared hosting environment and to allow each customer to use their fair share of allotted resources, web hosting companies tend to place capabilities on their shared web hosting plans to create conditions for each user there to have a smooth experience. This can be applied to many resources, such as Disk Space, RAM, CPU usage, I/O operations, database size, and email size.

Considering the above, it is no surprise that we at HostArmada want to create this type of environment for our customers, and thus, we had to create similar conditions for it to happen, namely, adding capabilities to our email account's disk space utilization.

Therefore managing healthy disk space usage for your email accounts will be critical for your account's and your overall experience using the Shared Web Hosting service. In the following lines of this tutorial, we will review the "Email Disk Usage" feature of cPanel, where you will have the necessary tools to maintain the disk space utilization of your email accounts and have complete access at all times to how much disk space are they taking up.

Accessing the Email Disk Usage feature in cPanel

Similar to any other feature in cPanel, to start using it, you will need to log inside your cPanel service. If you are not sure how to do that, please check our accessing the cPanel service tutorial.

Once that is done, you will be presented with a list of all the features cPanel has to offer. From that list, you will have to find the "Email Disk Usage" feature by either using the Search functionality provided at the top of the page or by locating the "Email" features group, in which the "Email Disk Usage" feature will be displayed.

Clicking on the feature will redirect you to a brand new page where further information for the utilized disk space by your email accounts will be provided. 

Managing the size of your email accounts

Now that you are in the right place, let's see what the "Email Disk Usage" has to offer. On the default page of the feature, you will be provided with a few useful tools and statistics. First in order will be a drop-down list representing all of the email accounts created for all of the domains associated with your cPanel Web Hosting Account. To review statistics and to reduce the disk space usage for your email account, please choose the email account you would like to manage first. 

In its default state, the selected email account will be the "Default Account". As we have mentioned in other tutorials as well, when every cPanel Web Hosting Account is created, the system also creates a default email account for the internal emailing purposes of cPanel, such as system emails concerning problems that need your attention and are related to your cPanel web hosting account. This email account is actually the cPanel username, and you can manage it like every other email account. Therefore, cPanel assumes that you might want to manage the disk space for that account in the same way as the disk space of any other. 

Right below the "Account" drop-down list, you will see a table representing the folders for the selected email account. Each row from that table is a separate folder, and each column presents different information, such as the number of Messages in the email account and, of course, the total Disk Usage for the concrete folder. 

Based on this information, you will be able to determine where the disk space usage for the email account comes from and take action to clean the folder and get your web hosting account in line. 

Let's select an email account that has some messages inside. In the final column of the table section called "Actions", you will be able to see a link called "Manage". However, this button will only be visible for the folders of your email account that have actual emails inside them. 

Clicking on the "Manage" link will expand the row of the specified folder and present you with an additional option called "Messages to delete". By using this option, you will be able to choose what type of emails should be deleted so the email account can be cleared.

The available options for you to choose from are:

• 1 year old or more - Please select this option to delete messages older than 1 year. 
• 30 MB in size or more - Please select this option to delete messages larger than 30 MB.
• Previously viewed - Please select this option to remove all read messages. 
• All messages - Please select this option to delete all the messages associated with your email account. 
• Custom Query - Please select this option to reveal another field in which you can enter a custom query in the Dovecot's Search Query format.

Once you choose what type of messages to be deleted, please click on the "Delete Permanently" button so cPanel can clear the messages. 

Please bear in mind that cPanel will not ask you for further confirmation, and clicking the "Delete Permanently" button will initiate the removal procedure immediately. Also, please note that the deleted emails can be restored from our complimentary backup service, however only if the deletion process took place for no longer than 1 week before the last cPanel backup was generated. 

This is the general process of reducing the Disk Space usage for your email accounts. Please ensure that you have a local copy of all the emails associated with your email account before you initiate the deletion procedure for your emails. In case you would like to clear specific emails, you can always log into the Webmail service and clear those ones by one, or if you would like to delete a bulk of emails based on some custom criteria, don't hesitate to get in touch with our Technical Support Crew since they will be able to assist you with any email related goal you are trying to achieve.