Hotmail or Outlook Not Receiving Emails? Your Microsoft Storage Is Probably Full

Your inbox looks normal. Nothing is broken, there's no error on the screen, and the Outlook app on your phone opens fine. It's just that nobody seems to be emailing you any more. Then your daughter rings to ask why her message bounced.

If your address ends in hotmail.co.uk, hotmail.com, live.co.uk, outlook.com or msn.com, the most likely cause is that your Microsoft storage is full. Not your mailbox. Your storage. Microsoft treats those as two different things, and only one of them shows up anywhere you'd think to look.

Two allowances, and the small one is the problem

A free Microsoft account comes with two separate allowances:

The catch is that second column. Since February 2023, attachments in Outlook.com count towards the same 5GB as OneDrive, and that applied to emails you already had, not just new ones. So twelve years of photos of the grandkids sent as attachments, plus a phone quietly backing its camera roll up to OneDrive, and you're over 5GB without having done anything differently.

Go over either limit and Outlook.com stops sending and receiving. Anyone who emails you gets a bounce message saying your mailbox is full. You don't get a copy, and those emails won't arrive later on their own. The sender has to send them again once you've made space.

Who this catches out

In my experience it's mostly people who've had the same Hotmail address since the early 2000s, and I'd put it in two groups.

The first group never paid for anything. Their phone or laptop switched on OneDrive photo backup during setup, they tapped Accept, and the photos have been filling the 5GB ever since. Microsoft does send warning emails. They look exactly like the phishing emails everyone has been told to ignore, so a lot of people do.

The second group used to have Microsoft 365. Maybe a family member shared their Family subscription and then removed them, or a subscription came free with a laptop for a year and ran out. The moment it ends you drop from 100GB or more down to 5GB. Everything is still sitting there, so you're instantly over the limit, and the email stops.

How to check

Sign in at outlook.com in a web browser on a laptop or PC. The phone app won't show you this properly.

1. Click the cog (Settings) in the top right.
2. Go to General, then Storage.
3. You'll see your mailbox usage and, separately, your Microsoft cloud storage, with a breakdown of what's using it.

If the cloud storage bar is red or showing more than 5GB, that's your answer.

How to clear it without paying

Start with whatever's biggest. The storage page tells you whether it's OneDrive or your email taking up the room, so go after that first.

Photos and videos in OneDrive

Usually the biggest chunk. Videos especially, because a few minutes of phone video can be a gigabyte on its own. On the OneDrive website (onedrive.live.com) you can sort by size to find them. Don't just delete them. Download them to your PC first, ideally with a second copy on a USB drive, then delete them from OneDrive. If your phone is still backing up to OneDrive, turn that off in the OneDrive app or they'll start filling it again tonight.

Big attachments in old emails

In Outlook, use the Filter option above your inbox to show only emails with attachments. Old ones with photos and scanned documents in them add up quickly. Save anything you want to keep to your computer, then delete the email.

Empty both recycle bins

This is the step almost everyone misses. Deleted files sit in the OneDrive recycle bin and still count against your 5GB. The same goes for the Deleted Items folder in Outlook. Empty both, or nothing you've done above makes any difference.

Once you're under the limit, email starts flowing again. Ask anyone important to resend what bounced.

Or pay for more

If you've got years of photos you want to keep in the cloud, deleting them isn't really a fix. Microsoft 365 Basic is the cheapest plan, at around £2 a month for 100GB. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family cost more but come with Word, Excel and more storage. Any of them will lift the limit, usually within a few hours of paying.

That said, I wouldn't pay just to make the problem go away if most of what's in there is stuff you'd never miss. Sort it out once and keep an eye on it. And whatever you do, don't let OneDrive be the only place your photos live. Have a look at how to back up your PC properly for a setup that doesn't rely on one company's free allowance.

Things that don't help

Uninstalling OneDrive from your computer doesn't free anything. The storage belongs to your Microsoft account, not your PC. Deleting files from the OneDrive folder on your PC does free space, but it also deletes them from the cloud and every other device, so only do that if you've got another copy.

Setting up a brand new email address doesn't fix anything either, and you'd lose every account and contact tied to the old one. The Hotmail address is worth keeping. It just needs a clear-out.

If you'd rather someone else did the sorting, downloading and backing up, I do it regularly. I'm based in St Helens and it's a normal part of my computer repair work. I'll also stop your phone and laptop filling it straight back up.

Mark

Mark has been fixing computers since the late '90s and went self-employed in 2008. Based in St Helens since 2013, he works evenings and weekends from his home in Laffak, doing friendly, affordable repairs for PCs, laptops, and Macs. See reviews on Google