Knowledgebase

When using email services through WebAfrica, you need to be aware of the following mail related topics:

- Online disk space limit
- Bandwidth / Traffic limit
- Email size limit
- Recepients limit
- Email’s per hour limit
- What happens when I reach one of my limits?
- Guidelines for smooth email use

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Online disk space limit
Depending on which hosting package you have purchased, you will be restricted to how much email you can store on our servers.
This limit is set according to data size, in MB. 1 MB is a million bytes of information, which is also equal to 1 000 KB (kilo byte). Typically 1 byte is equal to 1 letter or number. A small text only email, would typically only occupy a few KB’s of disk space, where as an email containing attachments, could be much more up to a few MB’s.

When someone sends you an email, the email gets sent from their computer, through their smtp server, through our firewall server, and finally ends up in our mail server. This is where your mails wait to be downloaded by you. This is where you would accumulate the "online disk space."

Normally when downloading your mails via POP (The traditional way), your mail client, such as Outlook, would connect to our mail server, download all messages, and then tell our mail server to delete all of the downloaded messages off of the server.
Therefore, if you connect to our mail server often, then chances of reaching the "online disk space limit" would be very slim.

Some users prefer to have us store all of their emails on our mail server. This requires the user to have a large hosting package with a high "online disk space limit."
The advantages of storing mail on our mail server, is that you can view your messages from multiple computers and/or locations.

Should you get close to your diskspace limit, we will send you notifications via email to warn you of this.
Remember that your disk space usage, is allocated as an average over the whole month.

Bandwidth / Traffic limit
Bearing in mind of the data size of mails from above; the size of emails also play a big part in your bandwidth usage.
Lets say that an email of 5 KB’s gets sent to you. Our server receives this message on your behalf, and therefore our server has used 5 KB of bandwidth to receive this message. This then gets added to your total bandwidth usage.
The same for outgoing emails; if you send a 5 KB mail to someone else, you will connect to our server, and our server will send your mail to the destination mail server. The 5 KB gets added to your total bandwidth usage.

Take note that your bandwidth usage gets reset at the end of each month.
If you find that you are using too much bandwidth and are going over your limit, then you can always use your ISP’s SMTP server to send out mail. For example, if you are using a Telkom ADSL line to connect to the internet, then you can change your SMTP server to smtp.saix.net. This means that when you send out emails, then you will connect to SAIX’s SMTP server, and they will forward your message on to the intended destination. This will therefore not use our mail server, and you will not get allocated the bandwidth usage.

Should you get close to your bandwidth limit, we will send you notifications via email to warn you of this.

Email size limit
There is a size restriction of 10 MB’s on any email that you send out.
This size limit dictates the maximum size of all your attachments to one email.


Recipients limit
The maximum amount of recipients that you can send to in one email is 25.
This includes "CC’s" and BCC’s"


Email’s per hour limit
The maximum amount of emails you may send per hour is 300.
This includes "CC’s" and "BCC’s" ; for example, if you send 1 email and CC 5 emails, then this counts as 6 emails.


What happens when I reach one of my limits?
Bandwidth limit:
* Online disk space limit
When you reach your allocated disk space limit, you will still be able to use use more disk space, although for every KB/MB you go over your limit, you will get charged a designated overage fee.
When you receive our notification that you have gone over your limit, you can immediately contact us, to upgrade your package, should you wish to avoid overage charges.
Remember to weigh out the advantages of upgrading or simply paying for the overages. ie, if you are just paying for a few Rands of overages, then why not just stick to your current package.

Bandwidth limit:
When you reach your allocated bandwidth limit, you will still be able to send and receive emails, although for every KB/MB you go over your limit, you will get charged a designated overage fee.
When you receive our notification that you have gone over your limit, you can immediately contact us, to upgrade your package, should you wish to avoid overage charges.
Remember to weigh out the advantages of upgrading or simply paying for the overages. ie, if you are just paying for a few Rands of overages, then why not just stick to your current package.

Email size limit
If you send an email more than 10 Mb’s then you will get an error message, either saying that the message is too big, or you will simply get an error message saying that the message could not be sent. The error message depends on which SMTP server you’re using at the time of the message being sent.

Recipients limit
If you send an email with more than 25 recipients, then you will get an error message saying that the message has too many recipients, or you would simply get an error message stating that the message could be sent. The error message depends on which SMTP server you’re using at the time of the message being sent.

Email’s per hour limit
If you email more than 300 users per hour, then the chances of you getting blacklisted is very high.
When blacklisted you won’t be able to send out any further emails, until you have contacted your SMTP server provider.
Certain SMTP server providers may just temporarily block your mail account, where it will automatically be activated over a set time.

Guidelines for smooth email use
For the best email experience you can follow the following guidelines:

- Keep under the above limits.

- Use your ISP’s SMTP server to send mail. For example, if you are using a Telkom adsl line to send mail, use smtp.saix.net.
The connection may be faster, depending where your mail service is hosted, and you will avoid using lots of bandwidth on your hosting package

- Avoid sending emails larger than 2mb’s or even 1mb. The larger the emails, the longer it will take to send out the mail, and also the chances that the sending process will time out will be increased.
Should you have a fast adsl connection to the internet, remember that some people still use dial up, or GPRS, and will definitely not appreciate someone sending them large messages.

- Don’t send out unnecessary messages to other people, without them consenting to this before the time.
SPAM has become a major problem, and lots of people and organizations take SPAM very seriously. If someone complains that you are sending them SPAM, then your email address could get blacklisted on some servers, or depending on the severity of the SPAM, you could even be fined.