What Do I Do When My Mailbox Is Full?
All mailboxes fill up over time. Some faster than others, especially if they send or receive lots of attachments. What can one do to alleviate that?
Phishing?
If you received an email "warning," ensure it isn't a fake phishing email trying to get you to give up your credentials. Is it asking you to go to a web site? Is it a real site? Is it from a free Gmail account or some other random sender account that you don't recognize? Better to ask for help than compromise all your email and contact records, because that's valuable information to hackers.
Clean Up, Clean Up, Everybody Clean Up
We'll use Outlook for our examples because it's commonly used. When viewing a folder such as Sent Items, there is a sort at the top, by default "By Date." Scroll all the way down and you can delete old emails you no longer need from years ago. Shift+Delete them, or they will go into Deleted Items and you'll need to delete them a second time from there.
You can change that to Size and view messages with large attachments. If you select the attachment icon the attachment's dropdown should show Remove Attachment to delete it out of the message. You can also save it to disk or drag it out into a folder on your PC, and then delete it from the message. If you get into this habit it doesn't take much time at all. Note this works for Sent Items also.
In Outlook you can easily empty your Deleted Items by right clicking that folder and choosing Empty Folder.
Microsoft 365 Tools
Microsoft has a few more tools that can help. If you log in to your account at outlook.office365.com, or are using New Outlook, you can open the Settings menu (the gear) and search for the word "storage." The Storage page lists each folder and its size. If you click the Empty dropdown you can delete messages older than 3, 6, or 12 months, or the entire folder.
Grow Larger
Microsoft 365's default mailbox size is 50 GB. 100 GB of space is available by paying more, or if your account/license includes archiving Microsoft will automatically archive older emails for you into a parallel mailbox.
Need More Help?
As always ITS can help as well! Just give us a call!
December 2024
Send this article to a friend!
Subscribe to The ITS Connection
Related articles