Outlook saying I need more storage.

I understand you mentioned. Attachment count toward onedrive 5Gb.

So i check out my onedrive, and it said i only used 53mb out of 5Gb.. which is totally empty.
Now back to my Hotmail, it said my MICROSOFT STORAGE is 5.7Gb out of 5Gb.... so the red bar appear.

now the funny thing.
my EMAIL storage is 11.4/15Gb

so... what is going on here.
onedrive is 53mb/5gb empty
microsoft Drive is 5.7/5 exceeded
email is 11.4/15

this is so messy.. and hard to understand.

Microsoft Storage appears to be the umbrella term for all file storage, including attachments in Outlook AND OneDrive storage used directly. So 4GB of attachments and 500MB of OneDrive usage is 4.5GB of Microsoft Storage.

Microsoft is giving users 15GB of mailbox storage. That does NOT include attachments, just the text (and possibly embedded images) that is stored in the mailbox.

All attachments are being placed into Microsoft Storage moving forward, that has been capped at only 5GB.

This is a free service, they have every right to make this change, and frankly I've seen in other threads that the upgrade is $1.99/mo or $20/year which sounds reasonable, HOWEVER... This is intentionally deceiving and confusing for most users who don't comprehend the different without 20 minutes of further explanation. The limits should be 1:1 or the mailbox should be lower than the attachment storage. The way this has been implemented reeks of fear mongering people into spending money that they never had to before. More information should have been provided, and old accounts should be grandfathered into a middle tier somewhere.

Shameful rollout of this change, honestly.

"Microsoft is giving users 15GB of mailbox storage. That does NOT include attachments, just the text (and possibly embedded images) that is stored in the mailbox. All attachments are being placed into Microsoft Storage moving forward, that has been capped at only 5GB"

This is not true. It is clearly stated that "Email storage" includes attachments (see below). At the moment, it seems that email attachments count toward BOTH the Email and Microsoft/OneDrive storages (15 and 5 GB, respectively). This is so wrong. I fear that Microsoft doesn't care if users that have no 365 subscription migrate to Gmail, Yahoo etc. They just consume the storage of their servers which is now much needed for ChatGPT. Plus, they have probably predicted that many of them will succumb to their new rather predatory storage management and book a subscription.

I too am suddenly being affected by this banner, and with about 20 years of emails, it is hard work to go through the attachments as I don't have any really big ones. I totally agree that the 15 GB and 5GB should be separate, and this seems to be pushing us long term Hotmail/Outlook users to a new email provider. Fingers crossed this is just an error, and email won't be blocked.

And yes, about 6 weeks ago I started getting bombarded with spam, probably 20 plus a day in the afternoons, I think from America judging by the content. I have been reporting all these, and thankfully the situation is better now, but has taken a lot of clicks over the last few weeks.

Yes I understand what it says, but apparently some language bits haven't been updated, hence some of us are under the impression that attachments don't count in the mailbox storage, and others believe it still does as it used to.

Honestly not sure what's true anymore given the changes, but count myself lucky that I only use paid services for corporate, this is a tremendous letdown, Microsoft doesn't care either.

Thanks so much for this.

Just had same message over the last few days which I ignored at first and then realised I had to act on.

Obvs I had a lot of stuff I no longer need.

Once you get the hang of deleting etc it is fine.

Thanks so much for detailed advice.

D