Hotmail full

[Craig234]

I have 15GB full on hotmail, and so it won't receive new messages.

I've tried before to delete a lot of messages; it didn't help. I tried 'permanently deleting' the messages in the deleted folder, it still didn't help.

Previously, some days after that, it finally decided I'd freed some space and started getting messages. This time, same thing - it keeps not recognizing freed space.

I noticed an 'empty folder' button looking at my inbox, but am concerned if I press that, it'd deleted all my mail, not just deleted mail, so I'm not pressing it.

Any suggestions how to get it to free space as I delete mail?

 

[Ichinisan]

Sort by size and go through the largest.

 

[Craig234]

Thanks, I've tried to delete large ones, but it's the same issue, it doesn't change it being full.

 

[mindless1]

My memory of this is very vague, but I fixed something similar for someone a while back.

Something something yahoo took over hotmail and there is a bug where it won't sync right with email clients and the solution is use webmail to clear out that, letting you retain everything in your client side app and delete any or none, whatever you want to keep, but clearing out all still on their server through webmail interface.

If you instead meant you're already seeing this in the webmail interface, then obviously it's a different issue.

If this is using Outlook then another possibility is Outlook's pst file has grown too large and become corrupted, in which case you do something like create a new folder, move over everything to that folder, delete the file for the folder everything was in, then move everything back. There are other solutions trying to repair outlook pst files.

 

[Craig234]

This is just hotmail.com in a browser tab. Which I guess is now Outlook in a browser tab.

 

[Craig234]

Well, it's nerve wracking to let Microsoft Support have remote access to your PC, even when you know you contacted them, especially after watching dozens of youtube scam videos.

 

[SamirD]

Solution--get a new email address you pay for. These free email addresses have had bugs like this for years that the owners don't give 2 hoots about. Leave them and be done with them.

 

[Craig234]

Solution--get a new email address you pay for. These free email addresses have had bugs like this for years that the owners don't give 2 hoots about. Leave them and be done with them.

That would be a better solution if I didn't have so many things tied to this e-mail making it a lot less practical to switch.

 

[SamirD]

That would be a better solution if I didn't have so many things tied to this e-mail making it a lot less practical to switch.

And that's exactly what the free email companies want. My dad has this same problem with being tied to yahoo.

The transition isn't actually as painful as it seems though as most of the free providers can have an auto-responder set up for your new address and you can change all the registrations, etc tied to the old address--just some work to do so.

And the benefit of all this work is that you'd never have to deal with nonsense like this again from your email. I've got 25gb (I think) on my email now that I got back in 2004, and I won't ever have any issues with it because if I do I've got someone that is obligated to fix it.

Of course, you need to still have backups, etc, but you typically can't even do that if you want with free hosts.

 

[Scarpozzi]

Not sure what to tell you when your box is full of hotmale.

I don't know what server version they're running behind it these days. Office365 is basically a version of Exchange. Usage quotas are not always "real time" because they're calculations. In many mail servers of the past 20 years, your usage number was calculated and a value was stored to the database and compared with your quota. If you were over, the server would either notify you (by sending you another email...) or your account would be locked to stop receiving email....or both....or neither.

If you can link your hotmail account with a mail client on a Windows PC using outlook, that's your best bet for cleanup because you can select a lot more mail for deletion. If you get regular spam from a few companies, you could start by unsubscribing from those, then searching and deleting one company at a time... Just be aware your usage and quota calculations may run a day or more behind before it clears up. Exchange 2003/2007 and maybe 2010 was like that.

 

[don911]

I completely agree

Not sure what to tell you when your box is full of hotmale.

I don't know what server version they're running behind it these days. Office365 is basically a version of Exchange. Usage quotas are not always "real time" because they're calculations. In many mail servers of the past 20 years, your usage number was calculated and a value was stored to the database and compared with your quota. If you were over, the server would either notify you (by sending you another email...) or your account would be locked to stop receiving email....or both....or neither.

If you can link your hotmail account with a mail client on a Windows PC using outlook, that's your best bet for cleanup because you can select a lot more mail for deletion. If you get regular spam from a few companies, you could start by unsubscribing from those, then searching and deleting one company at a time... Just be aware your usage and quota calculations may run a day or more behind before it clears up. Exchange 2003/2007 and maybe 2010 was like that.

 

[mikeymikec]

I'd install Thunderbird, configure it to access your Hotmail account via IMAP, wait for it to copy all the e-mail locally, then I'd start analysing each mail folder size as well as the mailbox quota info via IMAP, and see whether you can figure out what's using up the space. You can also enable the 'size' column to sort messages by size in a given folder.

As a safety measure I'd consider copying all the mail you care about into the 'local folders' structure in Thunderbird so should you make a horrible mistake then at least you have a fall-back.

Personally I don't see why MS would need to remotely access your computer. The e-mail isn't there, it's on their server: If you fire-bombed your computer, it's not going to free up space in your Hotmail account. I'd go through the hotmail site to contact MS and have them take a look over it if I had ruled out all the simple possibilities and concluded the problem was a malfunction at their end.