Q: I have recently received notification that my Outlook mailbox is full, and that messages cannot be delivered, I’ve never had this in all the time that I have been using Outlook. The email message indicates that this may be as a result of receiving large files that have used up my quota, and that to remove the problem, all I had to do was delete the messages I don’t need from my “Inbox”, “Sent”, “Trash/Deleted” etc. The email also provided the following details:
Quota Type: bytes in the message
Quota Available: 10485760
Total Quota: 10485760
have deleted all but 761KB of folders and emails, and yet I am still receiving the same message. I have removed and re installed MS Office 2007 that includes Outlook, and note that the few folders that I left in Outlook before the removal and re installation process re appeared. The only thing that may have changed was that I installed Internet Explorer 8. All other system and program files remained the same. I cannot find any guidance as to how to clear the mail box, can you guys help?
A: This message isn’t coming from Outlook at all, it’s coming from your ISP, in this case Virgin Media. The clue is in the Quota Type part of the message. Virgin imposes a maximum single message size of around 10MB and a maximum limit on space on the mail server of 30MB.
What’s happening here is either that someone has sent you a message that exceeds the 10MB limit or that your Outlook is set not to delete files from the server after downloading them, so that you’ve exceeded your total quota. It’s most likely the former, in which case if you scroll further down the notification email it should identify the message that’s causing the problem. The solution is to sign into your account via webmail and delete the messages from there. That should clear the blockage and get Outlook working again.
Having said all of that, Outlook can begin to suffer performance issues when its .pst file becomes too large, but we’re talking 2GB or more before that starts to happen.
You can find out where Outlook’s data is stored by going to Tools, Options, Mail Setup
Originally featured in PCU126
