Do I delete attachments in
Outlook.com?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for
Askleo.com.
With the recent conflation, if you will, of outlook.coms
storage limits and One Drive's storage limits.
There's been a lot of confusion as to exactly what counts and why suddenly
people are running out of space in their outlook.
Com account that supposedly had 15 gigabytes free because
now all of a sudden their attachments are being countered against their
One Drive account and that has a much smaller limit.
The free version has five gigabytes worth of space, so it's not really all
that uncommon to run out of space across both and no longer be able to send or
receive emails until you take care of that.
Now, unfortunately, what most people want
to do is to delete the attachment, presumably an attachment that's been
downloaded for safety, and then leave the email,
the body of the email that had that attachment in
Outlook.com.
As it turns out, there is no user interface in Outlook.com.
that will actually do that for you.
So the solution that will allow you to delete attachments without actually
deleting the message is to use a third party email program.
Now, I'm going to show you how to do this
or what this looks like, at least with a Thunderbird.
However,
this applies to many different email programs,
including Microsoft Office's Outlook and others that you might end up using.
But the key is this is not something you could do at Outlook.com
you actually have to install and use
an email program on your computer to make this happen.
Here we are in my outlook.com account.
You can see that it is full.
I can't send or receive messages.
I have a number of messages here that have attachments.
All of these little paper clip icons, they all indicate an email with an attachment.
And this was manufactured.
I sent a bunch of 10 megabytes attachments
to this email account until I ran into the one drive storage limitation.
So I happened to have Thunderbird downloaded and installed already.
That's left for an exercise to the viewer.
Whatever email program you get, you use, you're going to want to, of course,
download it and install it to make this happen.
What we then do is we add this account to...
Here's our account actions.
We're going to add a mail account.
The email address I'm using for this example is askleoffree@outlook.
Com, which is my email address that is a completely free account.
It has 15 gigabytes worth of email
storage, but only five gigabytes worth of One Drive storage.
And of course, I need to enter a password.
Thunderbird, fortunately, knows the configuration to be used for outlook.
Com. However, I want to be very,
very clear about one important aspect of this configuration.
Note that it is using IMAP.
Use IMAP for this operation.
That will leave all of your email on the
outlook.com Server.
It will remove attachments,
but basically it's like accessing your email without removing it from outlook.
Com as Pop 3 does.
If you mistakenly configured this for Pop 3, then yeah, you'll free up a bunch
of space, but all of your email will be downloaded to this PC and only this PC.
By using IMAP, you can continue to access your email using outlook.
Com and whatever other email programs or
mobile devices you happen to have configured to access that same account.
So I will go ahead and click Done and it is going to set up the account.
We will finish because we're not going to connect anything else.
And there it is.
Askleofree@outlook.com
is in Thunderbird.
And there is my inbox that has a bunch of emails with and without attachments.
So what we're going to do is take one of these emails.
I'm going to use seventh 10 megabyte
attachment email, and you can see there it is.
There's one attachment, test 3.
Dad of 10 megabytes in size.
Now, before I delete it here, I want to bring up that same email in outlook.
Com so you can see what happens.
In outlook.
Com, there is seventh 10 megabytes attachment, and there it is.
There's the attachment.
It's 10 megabytes in size.
That's what you would see in outlook.com.
This is where you can't delete it, but Thunderbird is where you can.
Down here at the bottom where it says
the attachment, over on the far, far right is a button to save.
But there's also a drop down that lets you delete the attachment.
Now, deleting the attachment cannot be undone.
Be careful. Make sure you really want to delete it.
Usually, you'll want to download it and save it somewhere.
I've done that.
So we're going to go ahead and delete it.
Now, what's interesting about this
scenario is that there is still this reference to an attachment,
and there's still some, I'll call it metadata about the attachment
that is still present in the email in Thunderbird.
What's happened, though, is back in outlook.
Com, you can see that the attachment still shows there, but it says deleted test3.
D at. That tells you there was an attachment
with this message, but it has been deleted.
And most importantly,
rather than being 10 megabytes in size, it's now 784 bytes in size,
significantly smaller, and it's taking up a lot less space.
Now we can repeat that a time or two.
I'll do it with the eighth one and we'll do it with the ninth one.
Oh, ninth one doesn't have one right now.
There it is.
We'll go ahead and delete that one too.
So we've deleted 30 megabytes worth of attachment.
In theory, that should have brought us under the limit.
Let's go ahead and have a look.
Your storage is full?
Okay, we'll go ahead and refresh the page.
Your storage is 99 % full.
They're warning us because we're getting close, but we've made the change.
Now, one of the important things to realize here is that sometimes this
information isn't quite updated in real time.
By that I mean, you'll see the attachment
disappear, but the calculations that tell you how much of your disk space or how
much of your One Drive space is being used may take a little while to get updated.
But this is what it takes to do what you've been asking for.
The ability to delete an attachment
without actually deleting the mail means you need to use a third party tool.
My example has been Thunderbird.
If you don't have an email program of choice yourself, give Thunderbird a try.
If you do, make sure that it has the ability
to delete attachments without deleting email.
Most do.
But especially after seeing that Outlook.
Com's interface does not, it's something that's worth
checking out before you download, install, and configure the program that ultimately
then wouldn't be able to solve the problem.
I hope that's helpful.
I hope that gets you working again.
For comments, for updates,
for links related to this topic and more, visit
askleo.com/156096.
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Askleo.com
Thanks for watching.