IMAP Quota and Service Policies

Overview

Notes:

1. The SMTP limits in some cases exceed those of other mail servers. It is possible to send a message to mail.rpi.edu which will be rejected by other mail servers either because it is too large, or has too many recipients, or the recipient's mailbox is over quota. If you receive a bounced email message, first read it to determine which server bounced the email, and why it bounced.

2. POP3 limits connections to once every 5 minutes. But, this is a soft limit with a 60 connections padding. This allows bursts of activity, and accomodates clients that check on send. If you check for POP3 email every 5 minutes you will likely never see this limit. If you check for email every 1 minute the padding will run out after 72 minutes (1 hour, plus the 12 added during that hour). If you need to check for new email more frequently, we recomend using Thunderbird configured for IMAP. Thunderbird supports IDLE-mode, which will tell you of new email the moment is is available on the IMAP server.

3. POP3 is a subset of IMAP which views only in the INBOX. It is designed for older email clients. POP3 and IMAP email both reside on the same server, and share the same quota. IMAP folders other than INBOX cannot be viewed by a POP3 client, but their contents count against email quota.

4. Messages quarantined by RESPITE will be held for 45 days before being deleted. Respite sends a daily alert about newly quarantined messages. Messages marked as spam or non/spam are cleared from the database after 7 days.

5. WebMail is an IMAP client, and so is subject to that server's storage restrictions.