Fixing cPanel 'Inbox Full' & Disk Quota Exceeded on Exabytes

The "Disk Quota Exceeded" Nightmare

If you are hosting on Exabytes and your users suddenly stop receiving emails with a bounce-back stating Disk Quota Exceeded or Inbox Full, the issue is rarely just legitimate emails taking up space. Often, it's hidden folders, runaway logs, or untruncated trash filling up the cPanel inode or disk limits.

1. Diagnosing Disk Usage via SSH

Log into your Exabytes shared or VPS environment via SSH and navigate to the email directory. We need to find exactly which user is consuming the storage.

cd /home/username/mail/yourdomain.com/
du -sh * | sort -hr | head -n 10

You will typically see an email account consuming gigabytes of data. Navigate into that user's Maildir:

cd /home/username/mail/yourdomain.com/info/
ls -la

2. Clearing Hidden .trash and .Spam Folders

Email clients (like Outlook or Apple Mail) configured via IMAP often move deleted emails to a .trash folder on the server instead of permanently deleting them. Over years, this grows massively.

To safely purge emails older than 30 days in the Trash and Spam folders:

find /home/username/mail/*/*/.Trash/cur/ -type f -mtime +30 -exec rm -f {} \;
find /home/username/mail/*/*/.Spam/cur/ -type f -mtime +30 -exec rm -f {} \;

3. Rebuilding Mailbox Quotas

Sometimes cPanel's quota cache gets out of sync with actual disk usage. To rebuild it, run this script as root (if on WHM/VPS):

/scripts/generate_maildirsize --verbose --allaccounts --force

If you are on shared hosting, you can go to cPanel > Email Accounts > Manage and adjust the allocated quota from 1GB to a higher limit or Unlimited, assuming you have account-level disk space remaining.

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