Manage Outlook Storage & Optimize Space in 6 Quick Ways

For professionals and everyday users alike, Outlook has become a popular email client. Outlook provides a wide set of functionality for email, calendar, and task management; as a result, it contributes to users to get connect with their organisation easily. Manage Outlook storage and keep the inbox is a common limitation for many webmail or email services. If you have issues related to managing storage or simply have a cluttered inbox, then it is necessary to understand how to manage or clear storage in Outlook without any hindrance.

Managing Outlook storage is not just simply deleting a few old emails. It's about organising, speeding up Outlook performance, and keeping your account running efficiently. In this article, we’ll show you how to delete excess data, avoid slowdowns in your account, and keep your email experience efficient and clean.

What is Outlook Storage?

Outlook storage is the storage space where everything in your Outlook account is saved, and that includes:

1. Emails: This is the major storage item, which includes an email message and its metadata (to, from, date, subject, etc.), and email attachments.
2. Attachments: Every type of file you add to your email begins to consume a lot of space in your stored data.
3. Calendar Items: Appointments, meetings, events, etc.
4. Tasks: Assigned tasks or to-do list items that you might have stored in Outlook.
5. Contacts: Every piece of information about your contacts, including their email addresses and phone numbers, etc.

Each of these adds to your overall storage, and over time, it can clutter your Outlook mailbox storage and cause storage issues if not managed properly.

Why Need to Manage Outlook Storage?

This is important because it can make your Outlook performance degrade, and some of the reasons are given below:

1. Avoiding Account Slowdowns: When your account is storing too many emails and attachments, it can have a major effect on Outlook performance. Searches can take days, and syncing with other devices can be delayed.
2. Easier Email Organisation: An inbox with too many emails makes it difficult to find what you need, especially important emails get buried under unimportant ones. Clear storage in Outlook will make the inbox stay more organised and easier to navigate.
3. Avoiding Storage Limits: Most Outlook accounts have a storage limit, especially free accounts. If your Outlook mailbox full, then you may not be able to send or receive emails, which can cause problems in communication with the other person.

How to Check Outlook Mailbox Storage?

To manage Outlook storage properly, you need to know how much storage you're taking up. Follow these steps to learn how to check Outlook mailbox storage usage.

• Outlook Desktop: Go to File > Tools > Mailbox Cleanup and select View Mailbox Size, so you can see how much storage you are using.
• Outlook Web App: Click the gear icon in the top right corner, then More Outlook Settings, then General > Storage. Here, you can see how much mailbox storage you’ve used.
• Knowing the Limits: Outlook provides different email storage limits depending on your account subscription:
• Free Outlook Accounts: Generally, free accounts have storage limits of about 15 GB.
• Office 365 Accounts: These can have up to 50 GB of email storage, and additional storage can be allocated as needed, beyond the initial limit.

How to Clear Storage in Outlook?

Now that you know how much storage you currently have available, let's go through some steps to help you free up some space.

1. Delete Emails You Don’t Need

• Use Search: You can use the Outlook search bar to locate older emails or larger emails. For example, you can search specifically for emails who is greater than 10MB by using the search term “size:10MB”.
• Delete in Bulk: You can select multiple emails to delete at the same time. Just make sure first that you want to delete them before you select them!

2. Delete Attachments You Don’t Need

Attachments tend to take up the largest amount of storage space in Outlook. Here are some helpful ways to manage Outlook storage taken up by attachments.

• Find and delete large attachments: You can search for any emails that have attachments (search term “hasattachments: true”) and delete any attachments that you don’t need any more.
• Save the attachments first: Before deleting attachments, you can save them to your computer or cloud storage (OneDrive), delete them from Outlook, then save them to your computer/location you want to save them to.

3. Clear Deleted Items Folder

Deleting emails doesn't immediately create space. You'll also need to empty the Deleted Items folder if you want to permanently delete the emails.

• Automatically Empty Deleted Items: You can set Outlook to automatically empty the Deleted Items Folder every time you close the program.

4. Clear Junk Email Folder

Various spam emails might take up unnecessary space:

• Delete junk emails automatically: You can set Outlook to automatically delete junk emails once they are placed in the Junk folder.
• Change junk email options: You can also change the junk email options by going to Home > Junk > Junk Email Options to control how junk emails are deleted.

5. Remove Calendar Items and Tasks

Old calendar events and tasks can take up storage without you even noticing it.

• Delete old events: Go through and delete old calendar events you don't want anymore.
• Clean up tasks: Go through and delete tasks that are completed or old.

How to Manage Outlook Storage - Free & Advanced Ways

To manage storage in Outlook, it requires both manual and automated methods. Those methods include:

Manual Methods:

#1 Archiving Old Emails

#2 Using Folders to Organise Emails

#3 Increase Your Storage Plan

Automated methods:

#1 Use the Clean Up Tool in Outlook

#2 Filter and Sort Emails

#3 Best Alternative Tools to Manage Storage in Outlook

Let’s briefly discover methods one by one.

#1 Archiving Old Emails

Pros of Archiving: Archiving is used when old emails are moved to an archive folder.

It allows you to declutter your Outlook mailbox but keeps emails saved for future use. Archived emails don’t use your Outlook mailbox storage.

• Automatic archiving: You can set up an automatic archiving of older emails in Outlook after some time, like 6 months or a year.

#2 Using Folders to Organise Emails

If you’re wondering how to manage email storage in Outlook, trying to organize emails in folders will help to reduce the chaos and allow you to find conversations easily.

Best Practice: You can create a folder by projects, categories, and regularly move emails into the folder to make and keep your mailbox clutter-free.

#3 Increase Your Storage Plan

If you regularly run out of space, think about upgrading to a larger plan or a bigger plan, in particular if you have an Office 365 subscription and can easily add storage from within Outlook.

Note: Till now, we've used only manual methods, but they have their limitations, as by clearing the storage in Outlook, some important emails might accidentally get deleted. So, to prevent human error, we should opt for an automated method as it can help to avoid unnecessary mistakes and make the clearing process of storage faster and quicker.

#1 Use the Clean Up Tool in Outlook

Clean Up is a built-in tool for Outlook that takes care of removing repetitive emails in conversations. Using the Clean Up tool can help save space since it will delete older or repeated messages in email threads.

• Conversation Clean Up: The conversation clean up removes emails that are part of more recent emails within the same conversation.

#2 Filter and Sort Emails

• Applying Filters: Filters permit you to sort or delete based on some criteria (age, size, or sender), resulting in clear storage in Outlook
• Sorting by Size: You can sort by size in your inbox to mark for deletion larger emails that are taking up unnecessary space, which helps to manage Outlook storage.

#3 Best Alternative Tools to Manage Storage in Outlook

By using the best automated tool, which is the SysTools Outlook duplicate remover Tool, designed for professionals, tech analysts, etc, it helps to identify the duplicates and remove them, which makes the Outlook performance smooth without any problem. It can reduce Outlook mailbox size by deleting the unwanted emails, attachments, tasks, etc.

It saves time, optimises Outlook performance and frees up space. By automating the process of identifying and removing duplicates, this tool reduces human error and ensures your Outlook account runs smoothly.

If you have many emails, contacts, or calendar entries, this tool could help you work smarter and reduce errors to manage Outlook storage easily.

Outlook Storage Optimisation- Prevent Mailbox Size Issues Instantly!

You can avoid and manage Outlook storage issues by doing a few things:

• Regular Maintenance - Set a reminder to delete old emails, attachments, and junk emails at least once every month.
• Email & Attachment Management - Periodically go through your inbox, deleting messages you no longer need and storing large attachments in a separate spot (e.g. cloud storage).
• Archiving - Set your emails to be auto-archived so that old emails are archived out of your main inbox to save space.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve discussed how to manage Outlook storage without any problem. Managing storage in Outlook and clearing the duplicates are important for keeping your Outlook mailbox and its performance effective. Following these suggested tips helps to clear the storage of your Outlook easily. Use an automated tool to minimise errors and prevent slowdowns, and maximise productivity in Outlook. So, start managing and clearing storage in Outlook to get the best results.