Limiting or Turning Off Drive for a Mailbox

Everyone on your account shares one pot of storage. That works well until somebody starts using their Drive like a personal cloud — a holiday photo archive, a film collection, an old laptop backup. The space they take is space the rest of your team no longer has for email.

You can decide, mailbox by mailbox, how much of Drive that person gets. It is available on every plan.

Where to find it

Go to Mailboxes, click the mailbox you want, and open the Limits tab.

You will see three choices. Pick one and press Save.

The three choices

On

Everything works, and this is how every mailbox starts. The person can open Drive in webmail, upload files, share them, find them in search, and connect Drive to their computer so the files show up alongside their own folders.

Email attachments only

Their email carries on exactly as before. What goes away is the file storage:

• no Drive in webmail
• nothing can be uploaded, including by dragging a file into the window
• files no longer turn up in search
• Drive can't be connected to a computer

Sending large files still works. Anything over 18 MB goes out as a download link, exactly as before. The one difference: that copy is deleted after 30 days, because the person no longer has a Drive to tidy it up in.

Most people who came here want this one. It sells email without selling storage.

Off

The same as above, plus files over 18 MB can't be attached at all. If someone tries, the message says the file is too big and asks for a smaller one.

Nothing gets deleted

Changing the setting never removes anybody's files. What is already stored stays exactly where it is — the person just can't reach it any more.

That is on purpose: those are their files, and a setting you flipped shouldn't destroy them. It does mean that turning Drive off doesn't hand you the space back on its own.

So the Limits tab also shows how much that mailbox is holding, with a Delete these files button next to it. That one is permanent, and the space returns to your account within a minute or two.

Changing lots of mailboxes at once

Opening two hundred mailboxes one at a time is nobody's idea of a good afternoon.

On the Mailboxes page, tick the ones you want and choose Drive access… from the bar that appears at the bottom. Pick a level, confirm, and you are done.

Do you automate your account with an API token or an AI agent? The same setting is there too. You can also say "every mailbox on this domain", which helps when each domain is a different customer.

Shared mailboxes

Shared mailboxes, like support@ or sales@, don't have a Limits tab.

Nobody logs into a shared mailbox directly — your team opens it from their own mailbox. So whatever you set for them is what applies when they are in there. Someone whose Drive you switched off can't reach a shared mailbox's files either, and can't use one as a way around the setting.

Putting a level on the shared mailbox itself would look like it was doing something while changing nothing, so we don't offer it.

What the person sees

Nothing breaks, and no error appears. Drive is simply not in their sidebar, files don't come up in search, and dragging a file into the window does nothing.

Mail they receive is untouched. If somebody sends them a large attachment, it opens the way it always has.

Related

• Mailbox Storage and Pooled Quotas Explained
• Drive in Webmail
• What is TrekMail Drive?