A (non-techy) friend has a free Microsoft account with the 5GB cloud storage limit, which applies to attachments. As far as I know he only uses Outlook.com for email, not the desktop app. Somehow this got to 5.3GB/5GB (107%) full, and it's not letting him send or receive any emails.
Now I've never had to worry about this myself, as I have a paid Microsoft account*, so when I was called in to solve this problem I thought, "easy, just delete some emails and it'll free up space". We decided to delete the oldest emails, specifically all emails from 2012, which was over 1,000 emails and many of them had large attachments. So we deleted those, deleted junk too, then went to Deleted Items to empty the folder - for some reason it wouldn't let us do this at first but eventually the option appeared - the deleted emails are now permanently deleted. But the figure of storage used hasn't reduced one jot!
There is no way (as far as I can see) to view the files that count towards this limit, and clicking on the link Microsoft "helpfully" provides to free up space in the Outlook attachments category just takes you to the outlook.com email inbox with no further instruction.
Searching around doesn't seem to reveal any useful answers either - just comments from people angry at Microsoft for forcing users to pay them to raise the storage limit, and while yes we could do that, I don't feel that that is an acceptable solution.
He does appear to have a few files in OneDrive, which appear in File Explorer when looking at OneDrive from desktop, and there's a folder in there called "Email attachments", but there's only about 20 files in there and none are particularly large, so I am assuming that whatever Outlook attachments are taking up 5.3GB are stored somewhere else, and cannot be viewed in OneDrive from desktop.
- Why has the storage used figure not decreased?
- Is it simply that we have to wait for some unspecified amount of time before Microsoft's statistics update now that we have deleted these emails? Or is the system simply bugged/rigged so that deleting emails doesn't actually delete the attachments ever?
- Is there any other way to view and delete these files?
Bear in mind as far as I know we can only use the online Microsoft services to do this and not the desktop app (unless there's a way to get them to show up in the OneDrive folder).
*I'm probably going to look to get rid of this at some point, as I've really not been impressed with what Microsoft have been doing to Office in the last few years and this experience certainly hasn't improved my opinion of them either... but that's irrelevant here.