inbox was full for 9 days... will I get the missing emails?

[#1]

Hi

I have a Totalise email account that apparently has a max inbox capacity of 250 MB!

I didn't notice it had reached capacity until I spotted that I wasn't receiving emails anymore. I'll try and keep on top of it.

Yesterday I archived a few years of emails and I was hoping I would then receive any missing posts - but this has not happened over night.

I am getting new emails that arrive after the clean up.

Can I expect to get the missing emails automagically or do I need to raise a support ticket? Or are they just lost?

Thanks

[#2]

No, No and Yes.

If a mailbox is full, new inbound mail is simply rejected. It is up to the sender to determine when if at all a resend should be attempted.

[#3]

Oh! My bad I guess. It's mostly purchasing invoices/notices/receipts that I'll miss

But that's my serious email account, so I could have missed anything. I guess I should rethink my email strategy.

Thanks for letting me know.

[#4]

Sorry @Townman... one more question... you say "It is up to the sender to determine when if at all a resend should be attempted."... how will they know it was not received?

I fired some test emails at the account before realising the low limits in place... I just checked and none of them were returned undelivered?

I have no indication that the emails never arrived... It's as though Plusnet kept the emails... are you certain I cannot retrieve them?

Thanks again.

[#5]

I have no indication that the emails never arrived... It's as though Plusnet kept the emails... are you certain I cannot retrieve them?

Plusnet won't have accepted the email, the server would have returned a code indicating a temporary error i.e mailbox full. What then happens will depend on the sending mail server. It MAY try again periodically, but how often and for how long depends... If you haven't got a 'failed to send' then it is probably still in the retry period

[#6]

Insufficient information provided to attempt analysis.

?

[#7]

Your comment dragged out knowledge from the depths of my memory. Retry periods are not necessarily static/fixed. They can be mathematical progressions (the retry time doubles on each retry). There will (should be) a maximum number of retries before the final rejection happens. (Or something like that).

[#8]

@Anywho  didn't your email client give you a warning that you were close to your 250MB quota ?

I've seen quota warnings using Thunderbird email client, it automatically get the sizes from the mailbox server.

Check your email client regarding quota warnings, or see if there is an add-on to perform that check ?

.

[#9]

Thanks guys... I guess it's no biggy.

If Plusnet just reject emails when mailbox is full then I'm stuck!

It's weird though, cos if I stopped using the webmail client for 3 months the account would be archived - but Plusnet would continue to receive emails for a period and I could recover them all... yet here I've potentially lost 9 days of emails!

Doesn't seem balanced or well thought out to me (If the totalise account had the same 2 gig limit that plusnet accounts get I suppose it would be less of an issue?).

I don't really use an email client (well, Thunderbird for archiving when the box is full!) just the webmail. And I rarely check emails (just enough to keep the email account active)... I only spotted this so quickly (!! - relatively) because I was looking for an email.

So I don't know where any quota notification would have gone - and I probably would have missed it anyway!

Thanks anyway guys... it would have been nice if a Plusnet employee had of confirmed that any missing emails are indeed lost - especially since the sticky on this sub forum still directs people to raise their Email issues here on the forum.

Falling standards I guess.

[#10]

1. I am not certain that the non-Plusnet brand email boxes are archived on 90 days of no use
2. If it reached capacity during that time, the result would be the same as per the recent experience
3. Plusnet brand mail ACCOUNTS (not mail boxes) have a 1GTB in total limit (not 2GB per mailbox)
4. Using a mail client on a device you use regularly is a preferable practice over something you need to take explicit action to do
5. I do not believe that there is any quota notifications to the mail address user on totalise accounts ... and even if one was sent ... if you do not read the mails regularly ... !!!
6. Does not need a member of staff to confirm what is already known within the community ...
   1. The legacy email brands have hard storage quotas
      1. When full they are not archived
      2. When they are full new mail cannot be received or sent (thinking of which a full warning could not be accepted into the mailbox)
      3. Where a party attempts to send mail, they will be given a rejection response with "mailbox full" status
      4. It is up to the sending party to determine what action to take
   2. Plusnet and Force9 brand mail accounts have a shared 1GB storage allowance
      1. If a mailbox is not accessed for 90 days it is archived - a message is sent to archived (not accessed) mailbox
      2. Where shared utilisation is over 75% a warning message is sent to the account's contact email address
      3. When utilisation reaches 100% dire warning messages are sent
         1. Mail is still processed
         2. Another dire warning will be sent after 7 days of the first
         3. If no action is taken mailboxes will be archived 7 days after the second warning

In all of the above, reading email regularly (to see the warning messages) is utterly essential.  Sometimes we learn through hardship!!

It is to be hoped that the sending parties will resend what was missed, though at 9 days the chances of that are slim.  Typically mail systems will auto retry for 5 days before giving up.

[#11]

---

@Anywho wrote:

... It's mostly purchasing invoices/notices/receipts that I'll miss

But that's my serious email account, so I could have missed anything. I guess I should rethink my email strategy.

.

The easiest way to stop any of this happening again would be -

• Start a third party email account with a personal/business domain name (I use Ionos) with bigger quotas.
• Recreate your Totalise mailboxes on the new domain name.
• Setup any email clients (e.g. Thunderbird, Outlook, etc) to use the new domain mailboxes.
• Copy your emails from your Totalise mailboxes to the corresponding mailboxes in the new account.
• Verify that your emails are safely on the new service, then delete the originals on Totalise.
• Delete your Totalise mailboxes, and immediately create a Totalise redirect (for each deleted Totalise mailbox name) to send any new incoming mail to your new account mailboxes.
• Consider moving your Totalise 'Sent' email folder contents to the 'Sent' folder on the new service, then empty the Totalise copy.
• Ensure that your Totalise account's default mailbox is also redirected to send new emails to your new domain.
• Then test all your changes by sending emails to each of your Totalise email addresses, and ensure the messages arrive in your new domain's corresponding mailboxes.
• Tidy up your email clients by deleting any references to the now deleted Totalise mailboxes

This has many advantages -

• Third part email providers don't archive your messages if you don't login for 3 months.
• You can choose whatever quota will suit your needs, and be able to increase it if needed.
• You will have a new independent personal domain that you can start to use instead of the ISP locked email name.
• With the uncertainty of whether Plusnet will support email for much longer, migrating now to a new domain reduces your risk of suddenly losing your emails at short notice.
• Using an independent email provider, means that there is one less thing preventing you switching to a better ISP.
• Third party email providers provide much better support, webmail (that works properly), SPAM filtering, virus detection, etc.

.

[#12]

@Townman - I appreciate you have a lot of information on hand to share with less well-informed users but some situations require more than just a regurgitation of this spiel (as I have already demonstrated elsewhere).

This is such a situation.

Immediately before I archived my emails I sent emails to my Totalise account from 3 different providers (in case there was some issue between providers) Microsoft, Yahoo and Gmail. They were all sent on 1 Feb 2025 around 2pm. Not one of those providers has notified me that the email has not been received - hence my suspicion that in this instance the emails were indeed received but now nobody cba to recover them.

Part of my troubleshooting also involved me sending an email FROM my Totalise account which arrived instantly (though obviously gave some warning about the message not being saved in the "Sent" items). This didn't seem worth mentioning before since it wasn't relevant.

So, you can see my real experience here once again contradicts what you are writing - which reflects on your already tarnished credibility (in my eyes at least). I was able to send an email and I have not received any "rejection" notifications.

My rather natural conclusion to all of this is that Plusnet accepted the emails and then checked using its own internal script/software if a mailbox or account limit has been reached and distributes the email accordingly... but since the email has already been accepted there is no auto-notification to the original sender UNLESS Plusnet actually bother to develop/code such a solution. This approach makes the situation where a mailbox is "archived" by Plusnet easy to handle too with no need for extra software/work (indeed it was probably implemented like this for archived boxes and then adapted for the various different email accounts and box limits).

You see, I've been a software developer and I've seen first hand the half ars3d solutions that get implemented to save a little time/money even on critical developments and the things that get missed and left out.

You may be right about the mailbox limits though... I don't know and frankly I don't care!

-----------------

@outcast - I take your recommendations on-board.

Please consider, when I started using Totalise I became a shareholder (along with the free shares I bought "a few". Indeed, there was a spell where I sold shares for nearly £1 a share! Sadly I bought back in again when they dropped!!) and I intended for this to be my 3rd party life-long mail provider hence why it still receives my serious emails to this day.

After their demise I paid Madasafish (I think?!) what felt like a considerable amount of money every year just to continue the important email account. They were a 3rd party email provider - for me at least.

At this time I started to utilise my own domain name email address a little more just-in-case. But then, when Plusnet took over the Totalise emails I considered the ISP that I had been using for I don't know how long (probably close to their start? Maybe 2001 when Freeserve was bought out, dunno) was probably safe as an email provider and reverted all my eggs back to the original basket.

So you see, even following your advice does not guarantee I will be safe; they may go bust, sell-out, change business strategy/model whatever.

You are right though... I do need to revisit and come up with a more sustainable strategy.

-----------------

Really, I appreciate all of the advice and help being proffered, but at the risk of sounding ungrateful all I asked about was the process for emails that arrive at a full Inbox/account.

Since my ACTUAL experiences do not seem to tally with the answers that I have received so far I'm sure you would understand that I do not consider this matter concluded (nor that the people answering have any clue about what they are talking about).

It seems unlikely that the emails received at the full Inbox were rejected because I have not received any notifications to this affect. If they weren't rejected they must exist somewhere in Plusnets mail server. If it's not too much trouble I would like to have those emails forwarded/routed on to my mailbox.

If the process of recovering these emails is somewhat labour intensive and Plusnet cba to do it... then please just be honest and say this.

-----------------

@Gandalf - Sorry to drag you in, but is there any chance that you or someone at Plusnet can confirm that emails received at a full Totalise email account would be rejected without notifying the sender. This seems unlikely to me.

Moderators Note: Abusive comment removed

[#13]

---

@Anywho wrote:

@Gandalf - Sorry to drag you in, but is there any chance that you or someone at Plusnet can confirm that emails received at a full Totalise email account would be rejected without notifying the sender. This seems unlikely to me.

---

I believe the sender would be notified, based on what I’ve seen when I was in the support team, but @dave may be able to confirm though. 

[#14]

@Gandalf 

The sending service ought to have been notified, but that would not the the same as the sender being notified.

That all depends on the configuration of the sending service, how it treats the mailbox full NDR (temporary or or fatal) and for how long it will retry silently before notifying the sender.

The abandonment window could be anything between 2 and 5 days.

Consequently the sending user's perception of a mailbox full NDR is very much dependent on how the sending service responds to the receiving server's response.