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.
