Mailbox is nearly full email

[#1]

Hi all,

I've had a few emails from Plusnet to inform me that my mailbox is almost full. I'm a little confused by this as my Mac and iPhone are set up to use POP, which I thought removed emails from the server to the device. However, on checking Plusnet Webmail there are nearly 30,000 emails in my Inbox and over 80,000 in deleted messages, yet the mailboxes on my devices are empty? Within webmail, I also have the setting turned on to delete messages in Deleted Items when logging out, clearly this is having no effect.

Am I missing something and is there any way to purge all of the emails on webmail all at once or is this going to take me days to delete 200 at a time?

Thanks in advance.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

POP3 does have a setting that allows them to remain on the server; ensure this is deselected on your devices.

[#3]

@amacken 

Your post illustrates well the utter confusion which abounds when attempting to use POP3 to access the same mailbox from more than one device.  The only bit of terror missing from your description is that SENT items only reside on the device which sent the item.

If you want to access the same mailbox from sever devices, configure then all as IMAP and on one of them, implement a proper housekeeping regime to archive emails you want to keep locally.

Given the number of emails you can see in webmail, @Gel 's advice would seem to be spot on - your POP3 clients are configured to leave mail on the server.  However, the items in the DELETED folder is something of a mystery; POP3 clients do not use the IMAP server's deleted items folder.  Are the items in the deleted folder recent?  Do they match items you have deleted ONLY using a POP3 email client?

Culling mailbox contents

If you need to clean out your mailbox, may be because it is over quota, then as well as tidying up the inbox, you need to also look at the SENT ITEMS folder and then afterwards clear out the TRASH folder. However some times webmail performance can make this process very tedious, particularly if the delete action (actually a move to the trash folder) fails.

If you primarily want to delete emails, you can mitigate delete performance issues by doing an "immediate" delete (rather than a move to trash for deletion later) by holding down the SHIFT key when pressing the DEL key. This works in both webmail and most PC based email clients. WARNING SHIFT+DEL is not recoverable so be certain absolutely, that you do not need the email before pressing the buttons!

Alternatively, in webmail (Round Cube) Settings -> Server Settings there are some options worth exploring controlling how deletes are performed...

1. Flag the message for deletion instead of delete
2. If moving messages to "Deleted Items" fails, permanently delete them
3. Compact Inbox on logout

Setting these options and using them together will avoid the over heads of moving items to the trash folder when you wish to delete them. They will simply be greyed out and remain in the inbox list. After logging out of webmail, they will then be removed from the mailbox.

Whilst this might be highly proficient, it needs to be used with care, for when they are gone, they are gone. Note also that Plusnet house-keeping clears out the trash folder weekly.

[#4]

Thank you Gel, it seems I overlooked that setting so this should work going forward.

[#5]

Thank you @Townman , the deleted folder is, as you say, a confusing one, the deleted emails go back many years. 

[#6]

If I read your response to suggest that there are no items deleted recently using webmail in the deleted folder, then one might infer that they relate to some time in the past when you were using an IMAP client, be that webmail or some other device.

Use the webmail client to clear down that folder ... or configure some other device as an IMAP client and use that.  Other devices are more tolerant of server time-outs than is web mail, especially if the folders are large.

HOWEVER Plusnet's mailbox house keeping SHOULD purge deleted item folders of their contents which were deleted more than 8 days ago every week.  You might care to check the folder settings in webmail ... see if there is more than one folder called "deleted items".  Ensure that the one which contains all of the items is marked as the system folder for TRASH.