A lert of alerts

My mailbox went over the 3 MB quota this morning. Someone sent me a 1.8 MB email and good ol' Outlook Express couldn't download it because our Internet connection was slower than normal. So, I did the next sane thing and went to the website to download the email using the browser, which is faster...sometimes.

What do I find in my mailbox? Six emails, two from the service provider telling me to delete my emails because my mailbox was above the limit. So, I deleted those two emails and tried to play around with downloading the "real" emails.

Five minutes later, there are ten emails in my mailbox, six from the service provider's automated system (again). Ten emails, each of an average size of 5 KB. That's 50 KB of emails in my mailbox which is already above the limit.

I kept deleting these emails till I was finally able to download the 1.8 MB email. After that, the automated alert emails stopped.

Send one alert, maybe even one a day, but an alert almost every minute? Did these guys even think about what they were doing?

Which brings me to the bigger question--Let's say that my mailbox is already above the limit and I don't know about it.

Would you let me know some other way (SMS maybe?) instead of sending me an email to the same mailbox that's above the limit? Or send me an email that is automatically downloaded before any other emails are downloaded (whenever I download my emails), so that I can take some action.

Is that too much to ask for?