One of the most common email problems we see is when an email account suddenly stops sending and receiving new email. There can be several reasons for this, but 9 times out of 10 it's a problem with quota.
Imagine a box for holding mail, let's call it a "mailbox". This box sits at the front of your house and every day someone puts more mail into this box. Now imagine you don't check your mailbox for a few days and the mail keeps piling up. Eventually the space inside the mailbox is going to be used up and as a result no more mail will be able to fit inside said box.
Suddenly you can't receive more mail because you've run out of room! Before you call out the Coast Guard, have a think about why this happened. If you'd gone out to the mailbox on a regular basis and brought the mail inside it into the house, your mailbox would never reach its maximum capacity thus allowing you uninterrupted mail service.
This same logic applies to the email account you've got setup in Outlook (or equivalent). If you replace "mailbox" with "mail server", and "house" with "Outlook" then you'll get a better understanding of what I'm going on about.
Each mail account we create for a client has a set amount of storage quota allocated to it. When someone sends you an email it goes to the mail server and sits there until you click on Send/Receive and download the email to Outlook. Once you've done that, the email is removed from the mail server, leaving you more space to receive new emails.
However, there may be cases where you're away from your computer for an extended period of time and as a result your emails pile up and your account quota is exceeded. When this happens you won't be able to send or receive new mail on that account. If this happens just give us a call and let us know what's happening and we'll temporarily increase your account quota, allowing you to download all of your existing emails. The best part is you won't lose any of your emails, so there's no need to worry about missing out on client enquiries or the latest newsletter you've subscribed to.
For more information on email troubles, check out our related posts.
