Tearing my hair out over repeated bounce backs.
 

I keep on receiving the following message even though my mail box (Outlook Express is nowhere near full. Have received similar messages for the past seven days .
Telstra techs advice me it is not a Telstra problem and is in the webmail system and to call a technician.
All I know for absolute certain is my mail box is not full and never has been full in all the years I have had a computer. The problem appeared a week ago. It seemed to originate when I sent an email with small attachment and included copy to my own email address. If I send the same emai to someone with same small attahment and do not include a copy to myself the problem seems not to always occur.,
: I have never emailed Emerites so I don't know they got my email address.
Other messages flooding my computer are basically same text apart from addresssee. I have had about 25 of them at last count. Something I send must trigger the problem? Really appreciate your thoughts.

This is what I receive:

A message was sent to you that was returned to the sender(bounced) because it would have caused your mailbox quota to be exceeded.The following is the reason that the message was over quota:

Quota Type: bytes in the mailbox

Quota Available: 5.3KB Total Quota: 10000000.0KB The following is the information on the message that was bounced:

Sender: "Emirates Skywards" <[email protected]>

Subject: Top 5 experiences to enjoy in Dubai on us

Size: 84138

Message ID: 15a2cdf4-5105-11ec-a44b-16c9ec321386

Date: Mon Nov 29 21:09:39 2021



Reply-To: "Emirates" <reply-160996-10_HTML-21959085-109597...emirates.email>

The message was bounced from the following folder:

INBOX

To fix this problem, delete some messages from your mailbox, and contact the sender to resend the message.

If the size of the message is too big, contact the sender to reduce the size of the message and resend the message.

I found by deleting or archiving some of your sent mail this should solve the problem.

Worked for me with Outlook Express

GGR

Could it be a phishing scam or a virus? Don't open the email otherwise you might get infected, just delete it and block the sender.

What type of connection are you using for your e-mail account? Is it POP3 or IMAP? Outlook Express is a piece of software on your computer and the local storage may have enough space available, but the mailbox in question is the one on your e-mail provider's server and this may well be full depending on how you manage your e-mail boxes. See if you can find the link and account details to log into the webmail version of your mailbox and check available storage in the online environment. The message states '5.3 KB available' which is a very small amount indeed, I would first of all check if the online system says something similar. If not, if that states that you have plenty of space available, you should discount these messages as they are obviously unrelated to your particular situation and may well be spam.

If your online environment agrees with the 'space available' bit in the message, you may need to do a bit of housekeeping to keep the mailbox from overflowing.
If you use POP3:

• Check to see if you're not leaving all messages on the server. With an Outlook Express installation you could easily delete them from the server after downloading. Make sure to regularly backup your local storage as this is the only place where messages are kept.

If you use IMAP:

• Consider deleting old messages, especially ones with large attachments, that you do not need anymore.
• Consider setting up one or more offline folders in your Outlook Express folder tree and move messages from the online (IMAP) folders into those offline folders to save space in your mailbox. Make sure to include the local folders in your backup structure for your local drives if applicable.

looks like spam to me

You need to realize that this has nothing to do with your own computer, or how many mails you have stored there. If genuine, this has to do with your mailbox at your provider.

What I'd do is find out if your provider has a browser portal to your mailbox. If so, go there and see how many mails are stored there.

You see, Outlook Express running on your computer is only a user interface into your mailbox at the provider. If you say delete a mail, Outlook Express should tell the mailbox at your provider to delete it. If this doesn't work, mails will accumulate at your provider, rendering your mailbox full. Also, there should be a setting in Outlook Express whether to keep or delete mails at your provider, once Outlook Express has fetched the mail. If not turned on, all mails you've ever received will accumulate in your mailbox at your provider. You might look into how "POP3" works, which is the technology often used for such, it's a protocol by which clients like Outlook Express talk to your mailbox at your provider.

<edit: looks like some of what I'm saying covered by earlier reply ... still keeping in case helpful>

Have you tried logging onto your email on line as opposed to your PC and trying from that?

Centy, the senders e-mail address is legitimate and possibly just marketing, as a Skywards member I get them all the time from Emirates and they are not too copious and sometimes they are actually quite useful.

The common e-mail transport protocol will often resend failed sent messages with an increasing time gap until it finally gives up. The message you have displayed in your original post is not from Emirates but from your e-mail provider and is telling you your 10Gb mailbox quota limit is nearly full and cannot accept an e-mail sent from Emirates, or from anyone else for that matter until you free up some space.

An e-mail mailbox is comprised of an inbox, an outbox, sent items, deleted items, and any other personal folders that you create to organise your e-mails. If all the messages in all these "boxes" add up to 10Gb in size then your e-mail mailbox will hit the quota limit imposed on you by your e-mail provider. Your e-mail provider may be different to your internet provider e.g. my e-mail provider is Google who offer me a 15Gb quota limit and my internet provider is Optus. Sometimes they can be the same, e.g Telstra (internet provider) have their own e-mail provider brand called BigPond. Outlook is not an e-mail provider, it's an e-mail reader.

Dealing with Telstra has always been a pain, but before you do the standard Telstra ritual of banging your head against the wall, have a look at all the sub folders in your Outlook mailbox then try and clean out as much of it as you can. Outlook does have a few technical ways of determining how much mail you are using but it's beyond the scope of this response. Should that not resolve the issue then contact your e-mail provider for assistance, not your internet provider.

Good luck, and hope you can get it sorted soon.

Thank you all for your assistance. I am most grateful.