To solve it, you can either subscribe to a premium plan or delete some Outlook data. However, in some cases, you can still get the error message even after apparently deleting lots of items on your Outlook mailbox. Now, the main reason behind it is that the items are still residing somewhere in your Outlook storage and haven’t been removed completely.In this article, we explain various ways to permanently delete an Outlook item to free up your storage.
How to Fix the Outlook Mailbox Full after Deleting?
From the mailbox feature to the sort feature, you can use various methods to significantly minimize the Outlook storage space.On the other hand, it might just be a glitch in the system. So, run Outlook in safe mode and also update the Outlook app. See if it solves the problem.Otherwise, apply each method until your problem gets resolved. But remember that they can permanently remove messages that may be unrecoverable in the future. So, we recommend you take a backup of the Outlook emails beforehand to be on the safe side.
Remove Deleted Items Folder Contents
Even after you delete the emails or other items in Outlook, they still reside inside the Deleted Items. While Outlook itself deletes them after a certain time (usually 30 days), they still take up space until you manually clear its contents. Therefore, you need to delete them too.
On the Outlook Web App
On Desktop App
Additionally, if you don’t want to manually empty the folder every time, you can enable a setting that automatically deletes those contents upon exiting Outlook.
On Outlook Web
On Desktop App
Use the Mailbox Cleanup Feature
Outlook has a built-in tool called Mailbox Cleanup that helps reduce your mailbox size. Using it, you can clear up the items that are still staying in the Deleted Items folder.Likewise, you can delete the Conflicts folder to clear up your mailbox storage. Outlook stores multiple versions of an item in that folder whenever it faces issues while synchronizing across different platforms (desktop app, OWA).To delete both,Alternatively, you can archive the older items into a PST file and save it locally on your PC to reduce the mailbox size and solve your issue.
Sort and Delete the Large Files
While you may have deleted many email messages, they might be just small-sized ones (not more than a few kilobytes). Alternatively, you can first sort the items taking up most of your storage and then delete the unwanted ones.Likewise, the attachments you receive in an email message might contain a large file, which is taking up your precious space. You can select all the unnecessary ones and delete them to increase your mailbox storage.To sort and delete the large files,
On Desktop App
On the Outlook Web Version
The above process can delete messages containing attachments. So, if you want to keep the attachment without increasing the mailbox size, you can download it on your local computer. For this,
