Managing .Mac Email Bandwidth and Storage

A few of days ago, I made on a post on Barkings about .Mac bandwidth concerns. A couple of people have inquired about how much data they can send, receive and store on their .Mac email account. .Mac Mail automatically has to 512 MB of storage, unless you change or upgrade it. In your .Mac account settings, you can assign up to 950 MB of storage to your email account. You can buy up to 4 GB of total email storage. The minimum amount of storage you can assign your email service is 15 MBs.

I found this helpful article in Apple’s .Mac learning center:

”.Mac accounts, comes with 1 gigabyte (GB) of combined email and iDisk storage. .Mac trial members and email-only accounts get 50 megabytes (MB) of storage; Family Pack sub-accounts get 256 MB. You can designate storage space to your .Mac Mail account and your iDisk. For example, if you need more storage space for your email messages, you can set your .Mac Mail storage capacity to 800 MB and reserve 224 MB of storage for your iDisk. You can also increase your combined email and iDisk storage to a total of 2 GB or 4 GB by purchasing more storage. (If you have a trial account, email-only account, or Family Pack sub-account, you cannot increase your storage amount.)”

Regarding bandwidth:

”.Mac comes with 10 GB of data transfer per month and a 10 MB maximum message size. You can increase your monthly data transfer limit up to 250 GB per month by adding more storage space to your .Mac account. You can also purchase up to 10 additional email accounts. (Email-only accounts get 50 MB of storage space but no additional .Mac services, and Family Pack sub-accounts get 256 MB of storage space, but cannot purchase additional email accounts.)

The 10 MB limit on message size includes the text of the message as well as any attachments. If you are sending an attachment that is nearly 10 MB in size, it may become too large once it has been encoded for transmission. If you are using your Internet service provider’s (ISP) SMTP servers to send your Mac.com email, check with the ISP for their servers’ limitations. Some ISPs may have a smaller size limit.”

If you can’t make the attachment small enough to send it through Mac.com, you can use your iDisk to share the file. You can create a FileSharing webpage or ask your recipient to open your iDisk Public folder to access the file. (Your recipient can open your iDisk Public folder from either a Mac or a PC.)”