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Bandwidth is one of the most costly parts of running an email service, and usually it's the top 0.1% of users who generate up to 50% of the total usage. The fact is most active users actually don't go over the 40MB provided to even just guests.
Eventually, every other service out there has to subsidise their bandwidth somehow, whether that be through advertising, or if there's a fixed yearly fee model, some users will be paying for a lot more than they use, while others will be getting a good free ride being subsidised by the low usage users. Who wants to subsidise greedy users who send/receive hundreds of large images or attachments each day, using your money and slowing down your email?
The reasons that many providers can get away without explicitly charging bandwidth is that:
Only a tiny percentage of people will have to think twice about bandwidth even on the cheaper "full" service level. But it's important for us because this group uses a large percentage of our total bandwidth.
This depends on your service level. See service level details and our pricing table.
You will not be able to send/receive mails from/to your account. You can however purchase more bandwidth and disk quota. See purchasing resources for details.
The disk usage per folder and quota usage are always up to date. The bandwidth usage is updated every hour
It means the amount of measured bandwidth you have used since the start of the current calendar month
Bandwidth is used when initiating any of the following:
See here for known bandwidth monitoring limitations and problems.
A typical text-only email is something like 10KB in size. With 40MB, you could send/receive 10,000 text-only emails before you use up your quota!
On the other hand, sending an email with a 1MB attachment to 10 people through the web interface will take:
So a total of 14.4MB which is quite a significant chunk of the 40MB allocated to a guest account.
If you regularly need to send large emails to many recipients, we recommend you look at mailing list providers
The following are known limits with bandwidth monitoring:
We recommend two main options:
A list of web hosting companies can be found here
A list of mailing list hosting companies can be found here
Currently it counts (twice). This is a limitation of the tracking and routing system that we have in place at the moment and is something we'd like to change at some point. This limitation only applies to actually emailing stuff to yourself; moving messages between folders using IMAP or the web has no such problems. The real issue here is that currently when you send yourself a message it actually goes through our ethernet card, and our provider charges us for it--we need to make it so that these packets use the local network interface instead so that we don't charge you and they don't charge us!
Of course if you use an email client on your PC it will always count, because the message is transferred over the Internet from your PC to us.
A typical text-only email is something like 10KB in size. With 40MB, you could send/receive 4,000 text-only emails before you use up your quota!
Keep an eye out for the size of any attachments you add to emails, or avoid sending large attachments, especially to lots of people. If you do need to send a large file to lots of people, upload it to a free web-space provider and send a link to the file instead.
Compress any attachments before you attach them to your email. The most common method is 'zip' compression. You can get WinZip, a free Windows based compression program at http://www.winzip.com.
Consider using your ISP's SMTP server (if you're not using the web interface). Since this doesn't involve OKmail at all then when sending an email, it doesn't count towards any OKmail bandwidth
Well let's say you receive this
That works out at 30*20*15k + 4*6*200k + 2*2000k = 17.8M a month in receiving the email, and a similar amount in downloading email, which is still under the 40Mb a month for a guest account. So 40Mb is actually completely reasonable for the average email user.
If you're using more than 40Mb a month, then you're probably more than a casual email user, so one of our paid subscription levels would probably be better for your needs.
Bandwidth included in your membership doesn't carry forward to the next month. However if you buy 1GB of extra bandwidth, you have as long as you like to use it.
The actual subtraction occurs at the end of each calendar month, not immediately when it's used.
This occurs because of the way internet email works. Basically, email is an old standard from many, many years ago that originally started as purely text data. Over time, as people wanted to send attachments and the like, they updated the standard to include them, but also tried to keep it backward compatible so older email systems at least wouldn't 'break' the messages.
To this end, any attachment added to an email is usually encoded into a form called 'base64'. In this system, each group of 3 binary bytes is encoded into 4 ASCII characters. This means a couple of things.
Our IMAP server stores emails in their original form, so any emails with attachments will be about a third bigger than the actual size of the attachments when you download them. The sizes reported on the mailbox screen, and the totals reported on the resource usage screen are of the original email as it's stored in our server.
This problem is most likely caused because you use an IMAP client. Basically, when you delete an email in an IMAP client, it doesn't actually delete the email; it only marks it for deletion. To actually delete the email, you have to 'purge' or 'expunge' the folder. So you probably currently have several 'deleted but not purged' items in some of your folders. These 'zombie' messages still contribute towards your quota.
Depending on the setup of your IMAP software, these 'zombie' messages may or may not appear. For instance, in Outlook Express, go to the 'View' menu, select 'Current View' and make sure the 'Show deleted messages' option has a tick next to it. This should show the 'zombie' messages as 'crossed out'.
The easiest way to get rid of all these messages is to use the 'Purge deleted' option in the 'Do Action' menu on the Mailbox screen. Note that you have to repeat this for all the folders.
Alternatively, you can purge from one folder at a time in your email client by clicking on the 'Purge' or 'Expunge' button. See this page for more information.
The web-interface does not suffer from this 'zombie' message problem because it automatically purges the mailbox each time you delete a message.