Pooled Storage Quotas Explained

Every TrekMail account has one storage pool. Email and Drive files draw from the same pool. Your mailbox owners share that pool with each other and with the account-wide files in the dashboard.

This guide walks through exactly how that pool is calculated, what counts against it, and what to do when you hit the limit.

The pool

Think of your storage as one big bucket. The bucket is the size of your plan plus any add-ons you've bought. Three things go into the bucket:

• Email — every message in every inbox across every mailbox in your account. Headers, bodies, attachments, drafts, sent folder, all of it.
• Webmail Drive — the personal file storage each mailbox owner has inside the webmail interface.
• Account Drive — the dashboard-level file storage that the account owner manages, including any folder shared with the whole account.

There are no separate buckets for "email storage" and "file storage." It's one shared pool. A mailbox that gets a 50 MB attachment uses the same 50 MB of pool that an account-wide invoice PDF would use.

How the pool is calculated

The full formula is straightforward:

pool = plan storage
     + Dedicated Mail Storage add-on (if purchased)
     + Drive Add-on storage (if purchased)
     − any dedicated per-mailbox allocations

Here is what each piece means.

Plan storage

Every plan includes a base amount:

This is the headline number on the Plans page and the floor your account starts from.

Dedicated Mail Storage add-on

Some accounts need extra mail capacity without paying for a higher plan or adding the Drive Add-on. The Dedicated Mail Storage add-on adds raw megabytes directly to the pool. It's surfaced in the Billing area when relevant and is independent of your plan tier.

Because it adds to the same pool, it benefits both email and Drive equally — there is no "mail-only" partition. The name reflects that historically it was sold as additional mail capacity, but in today's pooled model it's simply more space for everything.

Drive Add-on subscription

The Drive Add-on is the largest single way to expand your pool. It adds anywhere from 250 GB to 100 TB on top of whatever you have, billed monthly or yearly in your choice of currency. A Pro account on 50 GB plus a 5 TB Drive Add-on has a 5,050 GB pool.

The Drive Add-on is its own subscription with its own billing cycle. You can buy it, resize it, or cancel it without touching your mail plan. See Drive Add-on Pricing & Plans for the slider, the tiers, and what each one costs.

Dedicated per-mailbox allocations

Most accounts give every mailbox access to the same shared pool — that's the default and what we mean by "pooled." But sometimes you want to lock a specific mailbox to a fixed amount of storage so it can't drain the rest of the pool by accident. This is called a dedicated allocation.

When you mark a mailbox as dedicated and give it (say) 10 GB, that 10 GB is carved out of the pool. The other pooled mailboxes share whatever's left. The carve-out applies even if the dedicated mailbox is only using 200 MB right now — those 10 GB are reserved for it, not available to anyone else.

This is useful for mailboxes that should never be starved (a board chair's inbox) or mailboxes you want to gently cap (a noisy alerts inbox). Dedicated allocations are visible on the mailbox detail page; you can switch a mailbox between pooled and dedicated at any time.

A concrete example

Let's walk through a real account:

• Plan: Pro (50 GB)
• Dedicated Mail Storage add-on: 25 GB
• Drive Add-on: 5 TB (= 5,120 GB)
• One dedicated mailbox locked at 20 GB

Pool calculation:

50 GB (plan)
+ 25 GB (mail add-on)
+ 5,120 GB (drive add-on)
−   20 GB (carved out for the dedicated mailbox)
= 5,175 GB of pooled storage shared by:
  - all email in pooled mailboxes
  - all webmail Drive files in pooled mailboxes
  - all account-wide Drive files

The dedicated mailbox sees a fixed 20 GB cap of its own. The other mailboxes and the account Drive share 5,175 GB.

What counts against the pool

Everything that stores bytes on TrekMail counts. That includes:

• Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Spam, Trash, and any custom folders in every mailbox
• Email attachments (counted as part of the message size, not separately)
• Files you upload to webmail Drive
• Files you upload to Account Drive — including files inside folders you've shared with the whole account
• Trashed files in Drive that haven't yet been permanently deleted (more on this below)

Trashed files still count

When you delete a file from Drive, it goes to Trash and stays there for 30 days before TrekMail permanently removes it. During those 30 days the file still counts against your pool, because it's still recoverable.

If you're close to your limit and you've just deleted a lot, you can speed things up by going to Trash and emptying it manually. Empty Trash is permanent — the bytes are released back to the pool immediately.

Email vs Drive — no separate accounting

We sometimes get the question "how much of my 50 GB is email, and how much is Drive?" The answer is whatever the bytes are right now. There's no quota that says "email gets at most 30 GB." Both compete for the same pool. If your inbox is small and your Drive is big, that's fine. If your inbox is huge and you have no Drive files, that's also fine.

The dashboard's Storage card shows the breakdown for transparency, but the cap is on the total.

What happens when the pool fills up

Two different things are gated on the pool:

For email, when your account is at or near the cap, incoming messages start to bounce. The sender gets an "over quota" delivery failure. This is industry standard — there isn't a way to keep accepting mail you have no room to store.

For Drive, when your account is at the cap, uploads are rejected with a "not enough space" error. Existing files keep working — you can still download them and share them. The block applies only to new bytes coming in.

You'll see warnings before either happens. The Storage card on your dashboard turns amber when you're past 75% and red past 90%. The webmail interface shows a banner. We also email the account owner.

How to free up space

In rough order of how easy and reversible each is:

1. Empty Drive Trash. Anything you've deleted in the last 30 days that you don't actually need. Bytes released immediately.
2. Delete large attachments from old messages. Sort the inbox by size; the top of the list is usually a couple of one-off PDF or video attachments.
3. Delete old messages from Spam and Trash mailbox folders. Email Trash, like Drive Trash, holds messages until you empty it.
4. Move large files out of Drive. Download them to local storage, archive them to an external service, or delete them entirely.
5. Convert dedicated mailboxes back to pooled. If you had a dedicated mailbox locked at 20 GB but it's only using 2 GB, switching it to pooled gives 18 GB back to the rest of the account.
6. Buy the Drive Add-on, or upgrade an existing Drive Add-on to a bigger tier. The new capacity applies the moment payment clears.
7. Upgrade your plan. Moving from Pro to Agency adds 150 GB to the pool by itself.

Dashboard view

The Storage card on the dashboard Overview page shows three things:

• Used vs total, with a progress ring
• The exact byte count remaining
• A "Need more space?" link that opens the Plans page

If you click into Drive, the file browser shows the same numbers in the header and a per-folder breakdown so you can spot which folder is the heaviest.

Plan storage by tier

For reference, the base storage included with each plan:

Drive is available on all plans. Storage is pooled across email and Drive files on every tier.

Where to go next

• Want to expand your pool? Drive Add-on Pricing & Plans covers tiers, billing periods, and currencies.
• Hit your cap right now? See Drive FAQ & Troubleshooting for the fastest way out.
• New to Drive itself? What is TrekMail Drive? covers the product and what it's for.