Do not panic when you get an email message that you are "over quota".

Everyone who has an email account on Nexus has a certain amount of space they can use. This is called the quota. It is currently set at 2GB. If all your messages are text, this is a lot of space. However, if you receive messages that contain graphics or other complicated documents, you may find that you use a lot of your quota.

When you have used up 90% of your allocated space, you will receive a message warning you. When you reach 100% of quota you will no longer be able to send. A hard limit is set at 110% of quota. Any messages sent to you which would make you go over the hard limit quota will not be delivered. In this case, the sender receives a warning email to say their message was not delivered to you. Even if you have forwarding set up on your Nexus account, the sender's email is not forwarded (as it cannot be delivered to your account in the first place). Any Nexus warning messages should be forwarded, provided that email forwarding has been set up on your account.

To clear space for new messages, you will need to delete some items. Typically sent items can often be reduced, as can deleted items (which need to be purged to remove them from quota), finally old messages can be deleted (make sure they are 'purged' - deleted completely, otherwise they still count in your Deleted Mail folder). Note that messages with attachments can be very large, and purely by saving the attachments locally you can reduce the mailbox size without affecting functionality. You can check the size of each mailbox on the Nexus account settings page:
  1. Go to the Nexus account settings page https://register.oucs.ox.ac.uk/self/nexus
  2. Select Show email usage and quota.
  3. You will be presented with a list showing the size of each folder in your Nexus mailbox.

If, after considering the options above, you feel that you need a larger quota on your Oxford Nexus mailbox, please see requesting extra Nexus email quota for more information.

Examples of the quota warning messages are shown here: Nexus quota warning messages