Since February 1st, Microsoft started rolling out an update for Microsoft Outlook free users that changes the location of email attachments location.
From now on, Outlook attachments will no longer be stored on Outlook service which has a 15GB free space, and will be moved to the cloud storage service OneDrive which has a much smaller free allowance of 5GB capacity.
This resulted in many users having their emails disrupted by not being able to send or receive new emails since the size of their attachments now suddenly exceeds capacity due to this storage migration to OneDrive.
It was a surprise move from the Redmond giant that left many free users confused and angry since they were not notified about this, should we say, unfair change.
The company did make an announcement in a post on its support page before February 1, but it appears that this was not early enough for users to prepare for the change.
In the same announcement, Microsoft notified its users that Microsoft 365 Personal or Microsoft 365 Family subscribers will no longer be able to create new email accounts for any personalized domain associated with their Outlook.com mailbox. Users that are already using personalized email addresses in Outlook.com will be able to continue to use it, but if they remove it from Outlook, they won’t be able to retrieve it.
Users that exceed 5GB of free storage will be forced to buy a subscription or they’ll have to delete emails with attachments to lower the occupied storage space.