Situation: The client keeps receiving Failure Notice when sending an email to her client: 552: 5.2.2 The email account that you tried to reach is over quota and inactive.
Troubleshooting: 4 reasons for “552 5.2.2 user quota exceeded” error
- Email attachments
If an email account receives a lot of emails with large attachments, it can eventually fill up the email account of a user. This can lead to email delivery failures.
- Trash folders
Many email clients have a setting that the deleted mails will remain in the Trash folder until they are purge deleted. This results in the Trash folder getting filled up.
Trash folder also adds on to the quota of an email account. But many users overlook this aspect, causing trash to get piled up and quota to exceed.
- Email forwarders
Some users set up one or more email forwarders from their email accounts. If any of those forwarded email accounts exceed their quota, mails can get bounced from those accounts.
- Mail server restrictions
Every mail server has certain restrictions on the mail delivery settings. This is to avoid a single user or spammer from abusing the server resources.
The restrictions include limit on mail account size, mail attachment size, message content size, etc. If any of these limits exceed in a mail that is sent, it leads to 552 error.
In our case, Email forwarders to inactive email address is the problem.
