Account Drive: First Steps

Account Drive is the company-level file storage in your TrekMail dashboard. It sits at the same level as Domains and Mailboxes — a top-level place that the account owner controls and where your team finds the files that belong to "everyone."

If this is your first time in Account Drive, this guide walks you through where to find it, who can see what, and the few minutes of setup that turn an empty space into a useful one.

Account Drive vs Webmail Drive

Before opening anything, a quick reminder: TrekMail has two Drive surfaces. They look similar but are scoped differently.

Account Drive lives at the dashboard URL /drive. Open the dashboard, you're there. The account owner manages it. Folders here are either private to the owner or shared with the whole account — meaning every mailbox in the account sees them inside their webmail.

Webmail Drive lives inside the webmail interface, one per mailbox. Each mailbox has its own private file space. Mailbox owners manage their own. They also see any folder the account owner has shared with the account.

This guide is about the first one. For the webmail-side experience, see Drive in Webmail.

Finding Account Drive

Sign in to your TrekMail account and look at the URL https://trekmail.net/drive. That's the Account Drive home.

The first time you open it, the page is empty. You'll see:

• A toolbar at the top with New folder and Upload buttons
• A breadcrumb showing My Drive (you're at the root)
• An empty state with a hint to upload or create a folder
• A storage indicator showing how much of your pool is in use

The pool number includes everything in your account — mailbox emails, webmail Drive files, account Drive files. See Pooled Storage Quotas Explained for the breakdown.

Who can access Account Drive

By default, only the account owner sees Account Drive at /drive. This is intentional — most files in a company space are for the owner to organize and curate, not for individual mailbox owners to wade through.

However, the owner can share specific folders with the account. Once a folder is shared, every mailbox in the account sees that folder inside their webmail Drive. Shared folders are how you let the team collaborate on files without giving every mailbox owner a back-door key to the entire dashboard.

This means:

• The account owner owns the dashboard URL /drive and sees everything there.
• Every mailbox sees the folders the owner has shared with the account, accessible from inside their webmail.
• Mailbox owners do not see private (unshared) account folders.

If you're not the owner and you can't reach /drive, that's expected. Ask the owner to share the relevant folders with the account.

Your first folder

Click New folder in the toolbar. A dialog asks for two things:

• Name — what shows on the file list. Keep it short and descriptive: "Brand assets" beats "Stuff for the website that we'll need later."
• Color — optional. Pick a colour from the palette to label this folder. Useful for folders you reach for often (give your "Active clients" folder a green dot, your "Archive" a grey one).

Click Create. The folder appears in your file list. You can rename it later by clicking the three-dot menu next to its row, and you can change its colour the same way.

A few naming patterns we've seen work well:

• Top-level by category, not by date. "Clients", "Templates", "Brand assets", "Tax documents" — not "January 2026", "February 2026". Date-based subfolders go inside the category.
• Sentence case, not Title Case. "Brand assets" is easier to scan than "Brand Assets". A matter of taste, but consistency wins.
• Plurals for collections. "Invoices" not "Invoice", "Clients" not "Client".

Your first upload

Click Upload in the toolbar. Pick a file from your computer. The upload starts immediately and shows a progress bar at the bottom of the screen.

A few things happen while you upload:

• Large file handling. If the file is large, TrekMail uses chunked upload automatically. Faster on a good connection, and resilient if your network drops out for a moment.
• Pool check. Before the file is committed, TrekMail verifies your pool has space. If you're at the cap, you'll see an error and the upload is rejected.
• Same-name handling. If a file with the same name already exists in the same folder, the new upload becomes "filename (2).ext" — both copies are kept. Drag-and-drop overwrite is a deliberate, separate action.

You can keep working while the upload runs. Closing the tab cancels in-flight uploads, but completed ones stay safely on the server.

Subfolders and tree

Open any folder by clicking its name. You're now inside that folder, with the same toolbar — New folder, Upload — and the same rules. The breadcrumb at the top updates so you can climb back out one level at a time.

There's no hard limit on nesting depth, but please don't build folders fifteen levels deep. Two or three levels are enough for almost any organization. If you need more, you probably want a different folder structure, not a deeper one.

Moving files and folders around

To move a file, open the three-dot menu next to its row and pick Move. A folder picker opens; click the destination folder and confirm. To move multiple files, select them with the checkboxes at the start of each row, then use the bulk action bar that appears at the top.

Folders move the same way. When you move a folder, everything inside it goes with it.

Trash and recovery

Delete a file or folder and it goes to Trash, accessible from the left sidebar of the Drive page. Trashed items stay there for 30 days and continue to count against your storage pool until you empty Trash or until those 30 days expire and TrekMail removes them automatically.

You can restore from Trash any time during those 30 days. You can also permanently delete a single trashed item or empty Trash entirely if you need the space back immediately. See Trash and File Restoration for the details.

A short suggested setup

If you're staring at an empty Drive and want a starting point, here's a structure that fits most teams:

1. Brand assets — logos in different formats, brand colours doc, font files. Share with the account so everyone can grab them when composing client mail.
2. Templates — proposal template, contract template, onboarding deck. Share with the account.
3. Clients — one subfolder per active client. Inside each: signed contracts, latest deliverables. Don't share unless your team genuinely needs everyone to see all clients.
4. Tax & legal — invoices, government documents, accounting exports. Owner-only; do not share.
5. Archive — anything you might need but rarely look at. Owner-only.

You can refine this as you learn what your team actually reaches for. The goal of the first hour is to make it usable, not to make it perfect.

What's next

• Want to share a folder with your team? Sharing Folders with Your Team covers how it works and what mailbox owners see.
• Need to send a single file to someone outside the company? Public Share Links is how.
• Curious how much storage you have? Pooled Storage Quotas Explained.
• Ready to expand storage? Drive Add-on Pricing & Plans.