Hotmail wont send mail - mailbox full
Hotmail wont send mail - mailbox full
Author
Discussion

gotoPzero

Original Poster:

19,216 posts

206 months

Anyone got any ideas? The inbox does have 20k+ items but last week I deleted 5k items and a load of attachments.

Never done this before either, I always thought hotmail was unlimited.

Its on an ipad / iphone (not mine!)

Anyone know how to fix this as I have little understanding of apple cheers!

dxbtiger

4,500 posts

190 months

Tuesday
quotequote all
My wife has been battling this the last two weeks, I will ask her later how she solved it.

ARHarh

4,891 posts

124 months

Tuesday
quotequote all
Have you emptied the deleted folder? I have no idea how hotmail works but most emails keep stuff in the deleted folder for a length of time normally a week or 2.

gotoPzero

Original Poster:

19,216 posts

206 months

Tuesday
quotequote all
ARHarh said:
Have you emptied the deleted folder? I have no idea how hotmail works but most emails keep stuff in the deleted folder for a length of time normally a week or 2.
Yeah I emptied the deleted folder and also deleted a load of emails incl attachments - enough to at least clear a full inbox. I synchronised the mailbox and it took a good 10 mins to sort itself out and it seemed to work fine for about a week.


gotoPzero

Original Poster:

19,216 posts

206 months

Tuesday
quotequote all
dxbtiger said:
My wife has been battling this the last two weeks, I will ask her later how she solved it.
Cheers yes started about 2 weeks ago - seemed ok but back now and cant send emails.

Captain_Morgan

1,393 posts

76 months

Tuesday
quotequote all
Have you considered looking through the online portal and managing there.

It could be items are archived rather than deleted.

gotoPzero

Original Poster:

19,216 posts

206 months

Tuesday
quotequote all
Logged in via IE and it seems its some how undeleted all the emails I deleted last week.
Gone through it again and deleted it online so hopefully thats done properly this time.
Cheers all.

Road2Ruin

6,007 posts

233 months

Tuesday
quotequote all
gotoPzero said:
Logged in via IE and it seems its some how undeleted all the emails I deleted last week.
Gone through it again and deleted it online so hopefully thats done properly this time.
Cheers all.
That's because you only deleted them from the phone, not the email account. My wife's phone does this too.

Sheepshanks

37,855 posts

136 months

Tuesday
quotequote all
Road2Ruin said:
gotoPzero said:
Logged in via IE and it seems its some how undeleted all the emails I deleted last week.
Gone through it again and deleted it online so hopefully thats done properly this time.
Cheers all.
That's because you only deleted them from the phone, not the email account. My wife's phone does this too.
May not be the cause, but I think if pop3 rather than IMAP is used then that can happen if the settings are to leave messages on the server after download.

dxbtiger

4,500 posts

190 months

Yesterday (07:08)
quotequote all
Reply from wife was make sure you use the outlook app not the embedded email or whatever (I'm android) and she managed storage from there.

Seems to have worked, I'm sure outlook desktop would also work or outlook.com

Mr Pointy

12,598 posts

176 months

Yesterday (07:41)
quotequote all
I think the storage limit applies across the whole MS account so if you are storing a lot of files or photos you may run out of email storage & not realise why.

CaptainScarlet1967

52 posts

2 months

Yesterday (08:17)
quotequote all
Hotmail was never great despite the multiple rebrands / new looks, and the 5 gigabyte limit hasn't helped. It's now a case of 'to delete, to not delete or to pay for additional storage'?

Being a penny-pincher who doesn't want to pay for a storage subscription, here are some of my tactics:

- the Inbox is split into 'focused' and 'other', the latter usually being marketing spam, vouchers etc. Sift through the 'other' half of it and have a clear-out of that.

- do a search for 'from:@[domain.xx]'. It will bring up all the e-mails from that entity. E.g. car rental companies with all their marketing. Also helps to unsubscribe!

- empty the Junk folder (although I have recently found important e-mails somehow end up in it, so worth reviewing it).

- arrange your Inbox and Sent folders by item size (large to small). Delete / forward on to another e-mail address / download or save as PDFs (print to page) anything as necessary. Seemingly harmless e-mails without attachments turn out to be 'enormous' (>25 GB) in size when high resolution images are embedded in the body of the e-mail. NB it helps to have 'spare' e-mail addresses for forwarding large e-mails for storage. Of course, if you forward on an existing e-mail, it means you'll now have it twice.

- check your Hotmail cloud and review the contents. The storage limit is one and the same!

- delete forgotten-about draft e-mails with large attachments.

- In the short-run, send attachments as links.

As others have said, emptying the Deleted folder and then manually purging items (in the 'recover deleted items' section) speeds things up. I think it's a 30-day wait or something before it does it automatically.

RedWhiteMonkey

7,936 posts

199 months

Yesterday (08:21)
quotequote all
Sorry, I've got to ask, why do need to keep 20K+ emails?

Years ago I got into the habit of deleting read emails pretty much every day. The actual amount that need saving is surprising low, short term saves stay in the general inbox and long term saves go off to a relevant folder.

gotoPzero

Original Poster:

19,216 posts

206 months

Yesterday (14:18)
quotequote all
RedWhiteMonkey said:
Sorry, I've got to ask, why do need to keep 20K+ emails?

Years ago I got into the habit of deleting read emails pretty much every day. The actual amount that need saving is surprising low, short term saves stay in the general inbox and long term saves go off to a relevant folder.
Account has been in use since 1996. Never really cleaned up as there was no need. A camera phone pic in 2010 was what, 500kb. Now its 5Mb+.
Suppose there also comes a point where once it builds up its more difficult to go through and ID the junk from the not junk.

In her defence there have been times when information has been needed and she has gone into her email and dug out an email from someone in 2004. Suppose once its deleted its gone. There is probably some way to archive it all - but I cba doing IT support on that.

I am going to have to do the same as I have hotmail from 1996 too which must be near its limit and I know my gmail is at 80% of 15Gb.

Mr Pointy

12,598 posts

176 months

Yesterday (18:16)
quotequote all
Depending on the version of Hotmail client you may be able to export the emails to a .pst file which can act as a backup or be used to transfer to a different email client:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/export-...

FilH

921 posts

161 months

Yesterday (19:53)
quotequote all
This happened to me a year ago.

Was suddenly full, so deleted a load of old bigger emails.

Dropped the pecentage down a bit, but not loads. A few days later full again?


Turned out hotmail and cloud storage were combined and my 10 year old was making and editing short videos on the laptop ( that ive rarely used ) everything she saved, uploaded to my cloud storage.

Turned that off and all has been well with space since.

GuyW

1,093 posts

220 months

Assuming you're on the free plan? Given it sounds like quite a lot of life contained within, might be worth looking at paying for more storage, better security and support if ever needed etc.

Condi

19,092 posts

188 months

The sweep function and rules are quite helpful for this.

Separate your spam or marketing emails into a "mailing list" folder, by creating a rule, searching emails for the word "unsubscribe" and putting them into their own folder. You can then set up a sweep to delete them after 10 days, or just keep the latest email etc.

Hotmail also allow you to sort by size, so look through the bigger emails and delete any you don't need.

Depending how long you've had your email address it might be worth sorting by oldest first and deleting what you don't want, I found loads of old FHM and Loaded emails from easily 15+ years ago, sadly the pictures were long gone and there was absolutely no reason to keep them.