Evidently increasingly customers of the free model of Microsoft Outlook are being caught out by a devious modification to how storage works inside the e mail supplier.
Since February 1, the Redmond big has been rolling out a change to the place attachments in emails are saved without spending a dime customers – they’re now being saved inside the firm’s cloud storage service OneDrive, which has a a lot smaller free allowance of 5GB capability, as in comparison with the free 15GB allowance of Outlook.
The upshot is that many customers at the moment are having their emails disrupted, as they’re unable to ship or obtain new emails as a consequence of their backlog of attachments out of the blue exceeding capability as a consequence of this storage migration.
Caught unaware
Evidently, it has left many free customers baffled and confused on the change, feeling that not solely is it unfair, however that they weren’t even made conscious that the change was coming their approach.
One reader informed The Register that they could not use Outlook because of out of the blue exceeding the brand new shortened storage restrict. He was not conscious of the change, and could not see how he had gone over when Outlook was exhibiting him that he had solely used 6.1GB of the e-mail’s 15GB capability. He contacted Microsoft and it defined the state of affairs.
“So immediately, I’ve misplaced 10GB of e mail capability and since my attachments have been larger than 5GB that immediately disabled my e mail and triggered bounce-backs (even sending and receiving with no attachments),” he informed the publication.
He went additional to match the coverage change to “blackmail”, by “forcing [users] to purchase a subscription by the again door or to should delete emails with attachments regularly advert infinitum.”
One other person commented on the Microsoft forum (opens in new tab), saying that they’d been a person for over a decade and have been disenchanted on the determination. In addition they cautioned that the corporate risked turning folks away from its providers, since rivals, resembling Google’s Gmail, now successfully supply extra capability without spending a dime.
Some took to Reddit to vent their frustrations, with one person saying that their OneDrive restrict out of the blue exceeded 36GB after the change was made, while one other defined the issues it’s possible you’ll face if it’s a must to delete information from OneDrive however have forgotten your password for it:
“Hopefully your OneDrive password, as a result of if it’s essential reset it or entry information in a non-public OneDrive folder underneath this e mail account you possibly can’t obtain the reset e mail,” they wrote.
Microsoft did make an announcement in a post (opens in new tab) on its assist web page earlier than February 1 that the change was coming, nevertheless it appears it wasn’t sufficient to make lots of customers conscious that their attachment storage capability will now be a lot much less.
In that very same announcement, the corporate additionally mentioned that “Microsoft 365 Private or Microsoft 365 Household subscribers will not have the ability to create a brand new e mail tackle for any personalised area related to their Outlook.com mailbox.”
This alteration started rolling out to customers from November 30, and people with personalised e mail addresses in Outlook.com already will have the ability to proceed to make use of it, however now, in the event that they take away it from Outlook, they’ll not retrieve it.
To take action, they must develop into a paying subscriber to Microsoft 365, which additionally consists of an a lot bigger 50GB of e mail storage.
