very simple newbie mail question

[simonsomeone]

Hi. Well this could have gone in the mail section I guess but it must be so terribly obvious that I thought I'd put it here...

I recently got a web hosting plan with cPanel access. And so i set up some Mail, which is working fine. Its Imap, and I'm accessing it with Thunderbird.

The problem is i don't know how to delete mail from my account. I look on the file manager, but cant find any deletable chunks of data, and somewhere in the email section I can see how much data is in my various mail folders, but no way to delete it.

the default allowance was ridiculously low for. I upped my mail quote to 20 mb, then 50, now 70, but i need to find some way of deleting, as when the quota is full Thunderbird won't send or receive mails.

my local support person said this was about a mail quota on my own system, but I'm sure its on the server, because whenever I update that quota in cpanel, mail works again.

It seems such a ridiculous question but I'd be grateful if anyone could help. if it makes any difference (I suspect not), I'm using Safari on Mac, but I also tried Firefox.

thanks,

Simon Gregory

[cPanelDavidG]

Hi. Well this could have gone in the mail section I guess but it must be so terribly obvious that I thought I'd put it here...

I recently got a web hosting plan with cPanel access. And so i set up some Mail, which is working fine. Its Imap, and I'm accessing it with Thunderbird.

The problem is i don't know how to delete mail from my account. I look on the file manager, but cant find any deletable chunks of data, and somewhere in the email section I can see how much data is in my various mail folders, but no way to delete it.

the default allowance was ridiculously low for. I upped my mail quote to 20 mb, then 50, now 70, but i need to find some way of deleting, as when the quota is full Thunderbird won't send or receive mails.

my local support person said this was about a mail quota on my own system, but I'm sure its on the server, because whenever I update that quota in cpanel, mail works again.

It seems such a ridiculous question but I'd be grateful if anyone could help. if it makes any difference (I suspect not), I'm using Safari on Mac, but I also tried Firefox.

thanks,

Simon Gregory

Some mail clients will, when you delete mail, not actually delete the message but just move it to a "Trash" folder. You may want to make sure that if Thunderbird is doing this that you purge that trash folder periodically.

[kazar]

Hi simonsomeone --

I also use Thunderbird to access IMAP mail on my WHM/CPanel server, and also am using Mac. So I can confirm that cPanelDavidG's answer is correct.

When you delete IMAP messages in Thunderbird they are moved to the Trash mailbox that is inside the IMAP account's Inbox. In the left-hand pane of Thunderbird, you see the mail accountname that you've set up, and the Inbox below it. If you turn the triangle next to the Inbox down you'll see other mail folders that are on your IMAP server such as Junk, Templates, and Trash. (You may not see Junk and Templates; it depends how you set up the account properties in Thunderbird)

Control-click (or right-click if you have a 2-button mouse) on Trash and choose Empty Trash from the menu that pops up. Now the deleted messages are _really_ gone from your mail server.

[simonsomeone]

Thanks very much for those answers. I had assumed I needed to go into my cpanel mail or file manager sections to do it. That's that problem solved!


Simon

[Spiral]

Incidentally in the mail options for your email account on Thunderbird,
there is an option to automatically clear Trash when you exist Thunderbird.