"Who needs to delete when you have over 2000 MB of storage?!" --- This is what a large internet company says about their free mail accounts.

But actually what does happen when all space is actually used up? Since I am subscribed to some high volume mailing lists with my mail account from this large internet company it happened to me already sometimes that the account was almost full. To prevent trouble I just deleted some old mails whenever this occurred to happen. Then a colleague told me that what I am doing does not make any sense because he claimed to know that the account can just be filled up further and further, even more than 100%. That sounded strange to me but seemed to be actually an interesting question.

So this is what I did when this happened again for my account last weekend: Nothing. I just waited to see what will happen. Actually he was true in the sense that nothing happened. But not about the results. Actually I suddenly got much less mail to that account. This seemed to be somewhat suspicious to me and I sent a test mail from another mail account to my own mail account from this large internet company. The mail was sent without an error. The mail never reached my mail account from this large internet company. Neither the sender nor the receiver got any error message. The mail was just silently dropped. This is definitely not the error handling you expect from a mail provider.

So, what can we learn from this test:

1. Never trust your colleagues if they tell you some strange and fantastic stories.

2. Never use free mail accounts when you have to rely on receiving your mails.

3. Never expect people to do proper error handling for a case they are proud that it will never be needed. Titanic told this already in history.