CaribServe.NET Wireless Broadband Services -- St. Maarten's Premier Internet Service Provider

Maildir over quota -- How to clear out your inbox

Symptoms:

You have not received any new email messages and persons sending emails to you are reporting that the emails they send to you are being returned as undeliverable.

The above is usually the first indication that either a mistake was made in the sent to address or that something else is wrong.

Identifying the cause of the issue:

An undeliverable message will always list the reason why the servers was not able to deliver the message to you.

So, the first step in identifying the cause of the above is to ask the person, who received the undeliverable message, to open that message and to read through it carefully to look for the reason why the message was not delivered to you. Some of the most common undeliverable reasons are: unknown recipient; no mailbox for recipient and Maildir over quota.

As an example, the failure message below reports the following:

"<johndoe@caribserve.net>:

Delivering to /domains/mailstore1//caribserve//johndoe/./Maildir/

maildrop: maildir over quota."

Maildir over quota means that the mailbox belonging, in this case, to the account johndoe@caribserve.net on our server is full and thus cannot receive any further messages as there is no more space for new messages in that box on our server.

Resolution:

Step 1: setup your Outlook Express to download all messages from our server to your PC. The latter will prevent an issue like this from happening again in that the emails will be moved out of your "mailbox" in the "Post Office" (our mail server) which allows the mailbox to handle all emails. This is much like having a post box at the local Post Office -- if you open the box, read the mail and stick it back in the box, it will only be a matter of time before the postman cannot place any more mail in the box. Step-by-step instructions for this can be found at our online helpdesk

Step 2: You will need to log in to your account via our webmail program http://webmail.caribserve.net to read and thereafter delete all messages in all folders. Once you are done deleting, click on the “refresh folder list” and thereafter, click on “purge” that will appear next to the trash can. Once that is done, you should be able to receive mail again.

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