Why is a migrated mailbox over the mailbox size limit?

This article applies to recent versions of SmarterMail. View articles for SmarterMail 15.x and earlier.

When you migrate a mailbox over to SmarterMail from another provider, SmarterMail will migrate everything that mailbox contains. That includes all email currently in the Inbox as well as any folders that were created, not to mention calendar entries, contacts, tasks and even notes. (Depending on the process used to migrate the mailbox and the service being migrated from.) Therefore, even if you have a size limit set on a mailbox within SmarterMail, the migrated mailbox may be larger than the limit imposed once it's been migrated.

SmarterMail works this way to ensure that the mailbox is migrated completely from the previous email provider. If it did not work this way, a user may experience lost messages, contacts, calendar entries, notes, etc.

After the mailbox is migrated, and all information is within SmarterMail, a couple of things will happen:

  • If a mailbox limit is set, the user will be able to access their SmarterMail mailbox, but they'll see a warning that their mailbox is over whatever limit was set. Therefore, they won't be able to send or receive any new emails. The Domain Administrator will then need to work with the user to either get the mailbox within the limits imposed, or adjust the limits to better suit the user. 
  • If no mailbox limit is set, the user will be able to simply start using SmarterMail without encountering any restrictions or limits.

The migration process within SmarterMail was designed to move everything into SmarterMail so that a new mailbox is ready to go once the migration process has completed. If an administrator has imposed limits to a user within SmarterMail, those limits do NOT impede the migration process, only use of the mailbox once it's in SmarterMail.