If you’ve received a warning that your mailbox is almost full, act on it. Once a mailbox hits its limit, incoming mail bounces back to the sender instead of reaching you, and you won’t know it happened unless the sender tells you.
Here’s how to fix it.
Step 1: Log in to webmail
Go to https://webmail.emailsrvr.com/ and sign in. This gives you direct access to the mail stored on the server.
Step 2: Sort each folder by size
Go through each folder on the left side of the screen, one at a time. In each folder, click “Sort by” at the top of the column and choose “Size.” This puts the largest emails at the top.
Don’t expect to find one giant email that’s the culprit. It’s usually the opposite: years of small and medium-sized emails that have added up. Delete what you don’t need as you go, and pay attention to anything with large attachments.
Step 3: Empty the Trash
This is the step that’s easy to miss and it matters more than any other step here. Deleting an email doesn’t free up space. It just moves the email to your Trash folder, and Trash still counts against your mailbox quota. Until you empty it, you haven’t actually recovered anything.
To fully clear it:
- Right-click the Trash folder and select Purge “Trash”
Rackspace gives you a 14-day window to recover anything purged from Trash, so this isn’t an immediate, no-going-back action. After 14 days, purged mail is gone for good.
Step 4: Check the Junk/Spam folder too
Spam counts against your quota the same way regular mail does. Sort it by size and clear it out the same way you did the other folders, then purge it.
Step 5: Confirm your storage is back down
Deletion isn’t instant, especially if you deleted a large number of emails at once. Give it a little time to process. To check where your mailbox actually stands, click your username in the top-right corner to see your current mailbox size.
Ongoing habits that prevent this from happening again
- Unsubscribe from mailing lists you don’t read, or delete them in bulk rather than letting them sit
- Sort by sender occasionally to spot marketing emails piling up from one source
- Don’t leave large attachments in your inbox after you’ve saved them elsewhere
