Why is my Outlook.com
email suddenly full?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for
Askleo.com.
I'm getting this request or this question fairly frequently of late in the past
couple of months, and it's because Microsoft has been
rolling out a change to the way they manage storage in Outlook.
Com. Ultimately,
the bottom line is that storage for attachments and inline images is now
shared with your One Drive account, which means in turn that it's subject
to the storage limitations of your One Drive account.
For example, let's have a look right here at this email account.
This is an Outlook.
Com account and you can see right there front and center, your storage is full.
You can't send or receive messages or upload files to One Drive.
And of course, there's Manage Storage and Get Storage.
Now, the cynics among us might say that this is a ploy by Microsoft
to encourage you to purchase more One Drive storage.
I can't say that I disagree.
Normally, I'm fairly supportive of the kinds of things that they've been
doing, but this one seems really underhanded for one really interesting
and obvious way that I'll talk about in a moment.
But the real question is, what happened?
How did we get here?
Well, if we take a look at this specific
email account, I've only got, what, maybe a dozen messages at most.
And while some of them definitely have
attachments, there isn't really that much data associated with them.
The problem is the One Drive account.
Now, if we click on Manage storage, or if we click on this five gigabytes used
of five gigabytes, which is the free amount of space you get in One Drive
if you're using a free account, I'll click on that.
Now, there are two things you need to be aware of.
One is Microsoft storage.
Ultimately, that is One Drive,
and you can say that One Drive is maxed out at just over five gigabytes.
I have more than five gigabytes of information in my One Drive, but do I?
Well, take a look also at email storage.
Now, you have 15 gigabytes of free email
storage, and honestly, I've got less than 100 megabytes of email storage.
The issue is that of that 100 megabytes, a good portion of it is attachments.
And attachments now count against your One Drive disk usage.
So even though I've got 15 gigabytes of space, so called in my
Outlook.com account.
The reality is I've only got 5 gigabytes
of space for attachments, for pictures that happen to be stored
in email, and any One Drive files that I happen to have.
Now, here's the scenario where this really catches people by surprise.
In the past, One Drive and Outlook.
Com were completely separate.
There was no relationship between their storage.
You had 15 gigabytes in Outlook.
Com, you had five gigabytes in One Drive.
Didn't matter what you kept where as long as you were under those limitations.
The change is that they now share storage, at least at the quota level.
Now, let's have a look at, say, an average outlook.
Com account. Say you've got 10 gigabytes of email.
You actually have been using it.
You've accumulated a fair amount of email over time.
Let's say also that a lot of that email has attachments.
You've got documents, you've got PDFs, you've got who knows whatever stored
in your email as attachments to the messages you've received.
Those attachments, maybe they accumulate and exceed, say, 7 gigabytes in space.
In the past, that was no issue.
You were well within your 15 gigabytes of Outlook.
Com space.
But now, those attachments and any
pictures in email account against whatever your One Drive limit is.
So if your One Drive limit is five
gigabytes as it is with a free email account, then as soon as Microsoft rolled
out this change to your account, boom, you are out of space.
And as we saw in that first message, you can't send any more email.
You can't receive any more email until this problem is rectified.
Now, there are two ways to deal with this problem.
One is to start deleting email that has attachments.
Everybody wants
to delete just the attachments, say, maybe download the attachments,
put them in a safe place, and then delete the attachment
from the email, leaving the body of the email in place.
Unfortunately, the Outlook.com
user interface doesn't let you do that.
There's no way built in to make that happen.
I've got a future video coming up where I've got a fairly cumbersome workaround
that will let you solve the problem that way.
But we're sticking to Outlook.com
and onedrive.
right now, that is not something you could do.
The only thing you can do is literally delete the emails that have attachments
until you get it down under the limit of your One Drive account.
The other approach, of course,
is to go over to One Drive where you're also getting a message that you've
exceeded your limit and go into maybe one of the folders
that has a bunch of these files and start deleting them.
Here you can see I've actually got a 4.8 gigabyte file.
I could delete that and poof, we're done.
Now, what I'm hearing from a lot of people is that they don't realize that they're
using One Drive at all, which is very common.
The problem is that when you accept all
of One Drive's defaults, when you're setting up a computer or just
when you're setting up One Drive, it is enabling backup of a bunch
of folders on your system that you may not even realize are being backed up.
Those are getting uploaded to your
One Drive, and sure enough, they're all counting against whatever
the size of your One Drive account happens to be.
That can catch many people by surprise.
I've got an article on that how you probably want to turn that off
so that it's not bumping you up against your One Drive storage limit.
But now that with email attachments also
being included in this 5 gigabytes free, yeah, it's very common to run into this.
So the other solution then, as I said,
is to start deleting files from your One Drive.
Between that and your email,
you should be able to get enough room to start using your system once again.
Now, one of the other solutions that unfortunately doesn't work because it
puts you in a chicken and egg situation is to remember that back here in outlook.
Com, it says you can't send or receive messages.
What seems like it would be a nice thing to do would be to say,
take one of these messages that has an attachment,
forward it to another account before you delete it from this one.
You can't because you can't send messages.
It's a catch 22 situation.
You want to forward it on to a different account so you can free up the space,
but because you don't have any space, you're not allowed to forward it anywhere.
It's a pain.
So what should you do?
Honestly, bottom line, you probably need your
Microsoft account for your PC or for other things that you happen to be doing.
Honestly, if you find yourself in this situation, especially if you're using
One Drive, it's time to consider using a different account in my opinion.
It's time to consider using a different account for your email,
an account that has a clear and significantly less confusing
definition of what their limits really are.
This is without a doubt one of the most
confusing combinations of limitations that I've seen in a long time.
Alternately, the first alternative, start deleting stuff.
Delete either emails from your Outlook.
Com account that have large attachments,
or start deleting files from your One Drive account.
Alternative number two, and this is the one I'm reluctant
to suggest, because ultimately by doing so, I'm giving in to Microsoft's strong
arm tactics, but you could purchase more One Drive space.
If you decide you want to do that,
I'm going to recommend that you do so by instead subscribing to Microsoft 365.
Currently $100 a year,
but you get a terabytes of One Drive space as part of that package.
Honestly, even if you completely ignore
the rest of the things that come with that package, and there's a lot,
Microsoft Office and a bunch of other things, even if you ignore all of that,
that's actually not a bad price for a terabytes of online cloud storage.
However, that does let Microsoft win,
and that's something that honestly really rubs me the wrong way.
So I hope that helps you understand
exactly what's happened and gives you a couple of ideas on what you can do.
In an upcoming video, I'll talk about what it takes to actually
delete attachments, but not the body of email.
It's not pretty, but it is possible.
It's just fairly cumbersome.
For comments, for updates,
for links related to this topic and more, visit
askleo.com/156094.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com
Thanks for watching.