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Think of your hosted space like a bucket, and your website and email as sand. You can fill your bucket with sand up to the point where it won’t hold any more. Additionally, if your email client (Outlook) was configured to pull your email every two minutes, – the concept would then be like dumping out the mail sand from the server bucket every 2 min, while keeping the site sand in place. So, if you receive more mail sand than your bucket can hold in any given interval (2 min between dumping), then the extra sand that wouldn’t fit is rejected, or spills over. And, even though after you checking your email again, the previously rejected mail could’ve come in, it’s already been rejected.

Let’s say there was three messages containing some large attachments (photos) being sent to you at the same time (which amplifies the situation). Basically, the first two may come in, but then your server bucket becomes full, and the last large email is rejected. Additionally, since these emails contain large attachments, they are more like large bits of sand, or rocks. Therefore, even though the third message was rejected for being to big to fit into the server bucket, it’s still possible to receive a few smaller messages, up to the point where the bucket can’t hold those sizes.

So, you could simply say, “get a bigger bucket”… but there may be an additional issue that is causing the packing up of storage space that should be corrected vs adding more space to the problem.

I’ll write a detailed explanation soon that outlines the various email configurations that will further assist in illustrating the options available. (Topics: POP, SMTP, iMAP, Exchange Server, etc.)

Here at Pinion Media we are advocates of space and large pipes (bandwidth), and we have many hosting plans that boast enterprise level bandwidth and storage. But, you will not see “Unlimited” hosting options specified…. because we are also solid advocates of performance. – If a shared server is being dragged down by miss-use of one hosted account, all the hosted accounts on the server will suffer. Therefore, we pay close attention, and frequently monitor, the amount of space and bandwidth that’s being requested, and used for each account.

An example of miss-use is obviously spam and malware, but can be as simple as site image optimization, or even more common – client email configurations.

Email account settings configured to leave a copy of your email on the server will cause email to pack-up. And if you have your email client configured as a POP account, you don’t want to do that… (unless you have a another device that you POP to that pulls the mail as well). You want your email to come into your email client (Outlook, Entouage, Mac Mail, etc) and then get removed from the server to allow more to come in.
In your email client Account Settings, you should find a setting, or a check box, that is called something like “leave a copy on the server.”
And make sure this is not checked.
This will ensure that all of your email is delivered to you, and removed from the server, each time your email client requests it.