Maintaining your email storage is essential to keeping your mail flow stable. Without enough space, emails will bounce back to senders and you'll be unable to send new emails out. Below we'll go over ways to keep a healthy storage level for your mailbox and keep your workflow smooth.

Why It’s Important to Keep Email Storage Below Critical Levels

Avoid Service Interruptions:

When your mailbox reaches its storage limit, you won’t be able to send or receive new emails, which can lead to missed opportunities, failed communications, and potential downtime.

Improve Performance:

Large mailboxes with excessive emails can slow down Outlook performance, causing delays in searching, opening, or sending emails. This can extend to your computer itself and cause slowdowns with device performance as well.

Prevent Data Loss:

If your mailbox is constantly full and you’re forced to delete emails hastily, there’s a risk of losing important information. Regular management of storage prevents this panic-driven deletion.

Clearing Space

New Outlook/Outlook for Web

Clearing space via New Outlook/Outlook for Web is recommend due to its ease of access. Even if you prefer Legacy Outlook, the web version of Outlook will always host these same capabilities when logging in through outlook.com.

• Review your storage usage in Settings⚙️→ General → Storage. Here you'll find a breakdown of where most of your email storage is being used.
  
  
   

Once you have an idea of where storage is being used, you can start making room by deleting emails or attachments.

1. Mass deleting emails: Looking to clear space quickly? The simplest solution will be the empty entire folders based on rules of your choice. These options are available by clicking Empty next to the folder you'd like to clear. From here, you'll have the ability to specify a timeframe that you'd like to delete, or remove all contents of the folder.
   
    
2. Individual email deletion: This process is more hands-on, but if you'd like to be more selective, you can always delete individual emails. To find the emails with the biggest impact on your storage, head to the folder taking up the most space according to the storage information. From here, sort the emails by Size and sort order Largest on top.
   
   Here, you'll get a good idea of which emails can be removed to make the biggest impact on your storage.

Additional Tips

Clear the Deleted Items Folder

Emails in the Deleted Items folder still count toward your total mailbox size, so make sure to empty it regularly.

• Right-click on the Deleted Items folder.
• Choose Empty Folder to permanently remove the emails.

Unsubscribe from Unnecessary Newsletters

Unsubscribe from newsletters and promotional emails that clutter your inbox and take up space over time.

Regular Cleanup

Set a monthly or quarterly reminder to review your mailbox and delete or archive unnecessary emails.