You are over the default send quota of either
100 meg a day or 300 messages a day.
What do you do?

The default sent mail quota for an account is 100 meg a day or 300 messages, whichever comes first. Without attachments the 300 count will come first, with attachments, the 100 meg limit is likely to be hit first.

There is more to the size of a message than just the attachment size. Attachments must be converted to text to be sent via e-mail. This means MIME or UUEncoding and it will inflate the size of the attachment. The size is also multiplied by the number of recipients (how many people it's addressed to).

How to judge how large the message will be:

Take the attachment size and multiply it by 1.1 (to cover the inflation size when it is converted to mime, a guestimated 10%) then multiply that by the number of recipients.

Example, you have a two 2.5 meg pictures that you want to send to 20 friends, that would be (2 * 2.5) x 1.1 x 20 = 110 meg and this would be over the default quota of 100 meg with only one e-mail with two attachments being sent.

Things you can do:

- Shrink the size of the pictures/attachments. Smaller pictures means less data.
- Put the pictures/attachments in your web space and mail out a link to them (Internet Shield and Socks Plus accounts have free web hosting included).
- Put them in your ftp space and mail out a login/password (Internet Shield and Socks Plus accounts have free ftp hosting included)
- Don't mail them to as many people.
- Upgrade your account to allow more data:

Add 1000 count, 250 meg / day sent mail to your account for an extra $1 a month.
Add 2000 count, 500 meg / day sent mail for an extra $2 a month.
(if you need more than 500 meg / 2000 count ask about our dedicated SMTP servers)

- Make sure that no mail is stuck in your send queue (Outbox). If you have a mail that was stopped because it was too large it will still try to send again. This means that when your quota count is reset it will send you over again. You need to manually remove these queued messages in some mail clients.
- You can still mail to helpdesk when you are over quota. If you ask nicely they may reset your quota, however if it is a regular request, they may stop resetting it. In this instance you will have to either purchase an increased quota plan or wait until it times out.

Things not to do:

- Don't argue the count, the algorithm used is well tested and is measuring raw data. It's correct. If your count or measure differs then it means you are missing something. This could be that the inflation for text encoding was greater than the guestimate, that another client was sending/receiving, that some other uncounted messages were sent/received, or any number of additional things can vary the exact count from the expected count.
- Don't claim something must be wrong because it never happened to you before. All this means is that you have not hit the quota before, there is a first time for everyone. Something with this message is different than everything you sent before.

Why we are sure of our count:

We've checked our counts. We checked, we double checked, we triple checked, and we checked yet again our methods. It is the first thing everyone asks when they go over quota, that our count must be wrong. So we checked. And checked. And checked again. It's checked out as accurate every time. For years.

And should it be that one in a million bug, the issue so hidden in the nine lines of code that handles this that it goes overlooked throughout the years and billions of sent messages, should that bug appear, we believe that we handle so much mail that you won't be the only one contacting us and so we'll already be on it.

So please take it as a given that our count is correct. If you truly believe that it isn't then your battle is an uphill one, a very steep uphill one. We can only be swayed by hard data and won't look into anything without it.