Free up space in an email account

To free up space in a mailbox, first identify which folders and messages take up the most. Deleting hundreds of small messages can recover less than reviewing a few large attachments.

Before deleting anything permanently, keep the messages you need outside the mailbox and check that you can open that copy. Emptying the Trash or clicking Delete Permanently cannot be undone in webmail. An archive that is only synchronised over IMAP may receive the deletion too.

Find large messages in Roundcube

1. Sign in to webmail and open a folder.
2. In Options, sort by Size, largest first.
3. Review the messages and their attachments before deciding what to keep or delete.
4. Repeat in Sent, Spam and custom folders. Do not assume sent messages are expendable.
5. Check the Trash before emptying it. While messages are still there, they use space.

Downloading an attachment does not remove it from the message on the server. If you need to keep the whole conversation, archive the message as well, not just its attachments.

Clean up by folder with Email Disk Usage

Open cPanel > Email Disk Usage, select the exact address and click Manage next to the folder. If you come in from the webmail's own tools, the scope is already that mailbox.

Manage is not a deletion preview. Check the folder and review an equivalent sample in webmail before confirming. Roundcube search does not necessarily interpret the same query or the same date fields.

If you cannot work out what a condition will select, select messages manually or ask support. Keep All messages for a folder you deliberately want to empty, with everything you need already kept.

Custom Dovecot queries

The following examples describe selections, not instructions to run them without reviewing. They apply to the folder chosen in the panel. Delete Permanently permanently deletes the matches.

Internal date or message date

Messages with an internal date before 1 January 2024:

BEFORE 01-Jan-2024

Messages from 1 January 2023, inclusive, up to before 1 January 2024:

SINCE 01-Jan-2023 BEFORE 01-Jan-2024

BEFORE and SINCE use the server's internal date, which may differ from the visible date after an import. SENTBEFORE and SENTSINCE look at the sent date in the header. SINCE selects from a date onwards, not the messages before it.

For relative age, Dovecot accepts expressions such as 2weeks or 30days. Do not use months or years; if you need a stable cut-off you can review, give an absolute date.

Size and combining conditions

Messages before the cut-off and larger than 10 MiB:

BEFORE 01-Jan-2024 LARGER 10485760

A size without a suffix is in bytes: 1 MiB is 1,048,576 bytes. Consecutive conditions must all be met at once.

Messages from one sender within a date range:

FROM "avisos@example.com" SINCE 01-Jan-2023 BEFORE 01-Jan-2024

Messages whose subject contains a phrase and that are more than 52 weeks old:

SUBJECT "newsletter" BEFORE 52weeks

FROM, TO and SUBJECT look for text matches in the corresponding fields; they do not prove who the sender is. TO on its own does not include every Cc or Bcc recipient either.

Read status

SEEN selects messages marked as read and UNSEEN unread ones. That status does not decide what can be deleted. If you need it as an extra criterion, combine it with a cut-off you have already reviewed:

SEEN BEFORE 01-Jan-2024 LARGER 20971520

See the Dovecot search reference to interpret other criteria. Do not paste an advanced query if you do not understand what it covers.

Check the space and receiving

After the clean-up, review the messages you kept and access from another client. Quota indicators can take a while to be recalculated; avoid repeating a deletion just because the figure has not changed yet.

Tell the mailbox quota apart from the total hosting space. If you still need the email, you can adjust the quota when the plan has room or consider upgrading the service. If receiving has stopped, follow what happens to messages when space runs out.