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How to check email disk usage and manage folders in cPanel

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If you find your cPanel disk space filling up, or an email address has hit its disk space quota, cPanel has a helpful built in Email Disk Usage tool. This will provide you with a simple to understand breakdown of how much disk space each folder for a particular email address is using, as well as how many emails are contained within each folder.

The tool also enables you to quickly manage each folder and permanently delete email based on several parameters.

In this Guide we will show you how to access and check the disk space usage for an email address within your cPanel, as well as how to quickly manage and delete emails from folders.


Checking the disk space usage of an email address:

Firstly, log into your cPanel account. If you are unsure on how to do this, please view the following help article – ‘How to log into cPanel

Once logged in – under the ‘Email‘ heading, click on ‘Email Disk Usage‘.


The Email Disk Usage page will then by default, show the ‘Default Account’.  This is the cPanel catch all account (which is the same as your cPanel username) – this account catches any un-routed email to your domain.

Click on the ‘Account‘ drop down box at the top of the page, then select the email address that you’d like to check.


This will then display a breakdown of all folders contained within the email address, as well as how many email messages are in those folders, and overall disk space usage.

From here you can filter / sort the table by using the column headings.  If your email address has a lot of folders you can also use the ‘Search’ box on the page to search for a specific folder name.


Managing the folder of an email address:

If you find a particular folder is quite large in size, you can either manually go through your email client / webmail to manually delete emails no longer required, or alternatively use the Email Disk Usage page to manage the folder.

To bring up the management options, click on the ‘Manage‘ button to the right of the folder you would like to clean up.

Note: If a folder is empty the manage button will not show.

Next, click on the ‘Message to delete:‘ drop down box. For which you will see a set of options to chose from.

Here you can choose, for example to delete all emails within the folder that are older than 1 year, or all emails that have been marked as read.

Alternatively you can choose ‘Custom Query’ and use a custom selection query to set a different parameter for searching and deleting the emails within the folder, using Dovecot’s search query format.

Once you have made your selection, click on the ‘Delete Permanently‘ option to remove these emails from the selected folder.

If you make a mistake and remove the wrong emails, please see our guide on Restoring an email address from backup (this will restore the whole email address), or alternatively our guide on Restoring Files and folders from backup (This will allow you to restore specific email folders).


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