Online disk space limit
Depending on which hosting package you have purchased, you will be restricted to how many emails you can store on our servers. This limit is set according to data size, in MB. 1 MB is a million bytes of information, which is also equal to 1 000 KB (kilobytes). Typically, 1 byte is equal to 1 letter or number. A small text-only email, would normally only occupy a few KB of disk space, whereas an email containing attachments, could be much more – even up to a few MBs.
When someone sends you an email, the email gets sent from their computer, through their SMTP server, through our firewall server and finally, ends up in our mail server. This is where your emails wait to be downloaded by you. This is where you would accumulate the “online disk space.”
Normally, when downloading your emails via POP (the traditional way), your mail client, such as Outlook, would connect to our mail server, download all messages, and then tell our mail server to delete all of the downloaded messages off of the server. Therefore, if you connect to our mail server often, the chances of reaching the “online disk space limit” would be very slim.
Some users prefer to have us store all of their emails on our mail server. This requires the user to have a large hosting package with a high “online disk space limit.” The advantages of storing mail on our mail server are that you can view your messages from multiple computers and/or locations. Should you get close to your disk space limit, we will send you notifications via email to warn you of this. Remember that your disk space usage is allocated as an average over the whole month.
Bandwidth / Traffic limit
Bearing in mind the data size of emails from above, the size of emails also play a big part in your bandwidth usage. Let’s say that an email of 5 KB is sent to you. Our server receives this message on your behalf and, therefore, our server has used 5 KB of bandwidth to receive this message. This then gets added to your total bandwidth usage. The same for outgoing emails; if you send a 5 KB mail to someone else, you will connect to our server, and our server will send your mail to the destination mail server. The 5 KB gets added to your total bandwidth usage. Should you get close to your bandwidth limit, we will send you notifications via email to warn you of this.
Email size limit
There is a size restriction of 25 MB on any email that you send out. This size limit dictates the maximum size of all your attachments to one email.
Recipients limit
The maximum amount of recipients that you can send to in one email is 25. This includes CCs and BCCs.
Emails per hour limit
The maximum amount of emails you may send per hour is 300. This includes CCs and BCCs. For example, if you send 1 email and CC 5 recipients, then this counts as 6 emails.
Online disk space limit
When you reach your allocated disk space limit, you will still be able to use more disk space, although for every KB/MB you go over your limit, you will get charged a designated overage fee. When you receive our notification that you have gone over your limit, you can immediately contact us, to upgrade your package should you wish to avoid overage charges.
Bandwidth limit
When you reach your allocated bandwidth limit, you will still be able to send and receive emails, although for every KB/MB you go over your limit, you will get charged a designated overage fee. When you receive our notification that you have gone over your limit, you can immediately contact us to upgrade your package, should you wish to avoid overage charges. Remember to weigh up the advantages of upgrading or simply paying for the overages.
Email size limit
If you send an email of more than 25 MB, you will get an error message either saying that the message is too big, or you will simply get an error message saying that the message could not be sent. The error message depends on which SMTP server you’re using at the time of the message being sent.
Recipients limit
If you send an email with more than 25 recipients, you will get an error message saying that the message has too many recipients, or you would simply get an error message stating that the message could be sent. The error message depends on which SMTP server you’re using at the time of the message being sent.
Emails per hour limit
If you email more than 300 users per hour, then the chances of getting blacklisted are high. When blacklisted, you won’t be able to send out any further emails, until you have contacted your SMTP server provider. Certain SMTP server providers may temporarily block your mail account.
Guidelines for smooth email use
For the best email experience you can follow the following guidelines:
- Keep under the above limits.
- Use your ISP’s SMTP server to send mail. For example, if you are using a Telkom ADSL line to send mail, use smtp.wa.co.za. The connection may be faster, depending on where your mail service is hosted, and you will avoid using lots of bandwidth on your hosting package.
- Avoid sending emails larger than 2 MB or even 1 MB. The larger the emails, the longer it will take to send out the email, and the chances of the sending process timing out will be increased.
- Don’t send out unnecessary messages to other people without them consenting to this before the time. Spam has become a major problem, and lots of people and organisations take spam extremely seriously. If someone complains that you are sending them spam, then your email address could get blacklisted on some servers or, depending on the severity of the spam, you could even be fined.
