What happens when an email does not fit in your inbox?

Question

Suppose someone tries to send me an email with a multi-megabyte attachment, and there is not enough space in my Inbox folder on my mailserver to store the email. What will happen? In particular, will I be notified in any way?

Answer 1

That depends from your MTS. Specifically, it depends from what local delivery agent your mail server is using. For exim's appendfile transport, for example, the administrator might have used the quota_warn_threshold and quota_warn_message options to ensure that a warning message is delivered to a user whose mailbox is close to filling to its assigned quota. For Courier's deliverquota delivery agent, the administrator might have used the -w option to ensure a similar warning message be given to the user.

Since you don't tell us the LDA or how it is configured, the rest of the world won't be able to give you an answer.

Answer 2

this totally depend on how the mailserver is configured. it is recommended that the postmaster will be notified about undeliverable mail.

Example:

• postfix mailserver allows the following notify options: http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#notify_classes

Answer 3

As others have said, it really depends on the configuration of your mailserver. Typically, the mailserver will send a bounce message back to the sender indicating something to the effect of 'the recipients mailbox is full'.

However, in my experience there is every possibility that the mailserver will send a generic/unintelligible response back to the sender, or worse still, will simply drop the email without informing anyone.

Of course, I would expect your webmail software to warn you that you are near/have exceeded your limit, but it's not guaranteed. If you are accessing your email via an email client with POP3/IMAP, you are unlikely to be warned.

Answer 4

You won't get any notification but mail server will store it based on configuration but as default they will keep it until your subscription expired