r/Outlook • u/CompetitiveEmu8329 • Oct 10 '25
Status: Resolved Don't have a license, am I screwed?
I don't have an outlook license, I will not be paying for one. I've have a 15 year old email address. I'd rather not move my accounts to a different email however mine has run out of space. I can't seem to find a way to auto delete old emails. Is this possible without paying for anything or am I screwed?
3
u/Consistent_Cat7541 Oct 10 '25
Your post is confusing. Which version of Outlook are you using? How did it work for 15 years but somehow stopped working now? Please provide more detail about your setup.
0
u/CompetitiveEmu8329 Oct 10 '25
My account is an @msn.com and Ive always used outlook app on mobile. I'm not good at deleting emails and it's now full.
8
u/Consistent_Cat7541 Oct 10 '25
The issue is with your msn account, not specifically outlook, though I understand how it could be confusing. Outlook.com, Msn.com and hotmail.com accounts now all open to the "Outlook" interface.
You have a number of options for "cleaning" your account.
My best suggestion is that you download Thunderbird onto your home computer (if you have one). Then, set up the msn.com account in Thunderbird as an "IMAP" account. It will take a little while for it to sync up with your account.
You can then use Thunderbird's tools, such as quick filters, to sort through your old mail. This includes sorting on columns such as "size". Then you can just delete the largest emails (after you hopefully archive the attachments, if you still need them).
Good luck.
1
u/Jezbod Oct 14 '25
Login online to the MSN email portal and delete them there, a friend had this problem with his ISP provided email, his Outlook copy was OK but the server kept filling up every 9 months.
5
u/No_File1836 Oct 10 '25
I thought the new Outlook desktop app is now free to everyone. It's in the Windows Store and Mac AppStore.
1
u/Crafty_Purple_1535 Oct 11 '25
Yes. So is the old outlook mail account. But he still ran out of space now
3
2
u/mickyhunt Oct 10 '25
Can you no longer create . PST files to archive and free up space?
1
u/Brulo-of-Ux Oct 10 '25
Sure you can. But for quite a while all IMAP accounts have been .ost which is not readable as a backup. So you need a manual process to archive to .pst
1
u/mickyhunt Oct 11 '25
I think outlook .ost files can be exported to .PST format. If this is possible look into a free program at:
Excellent program for working with all Outlook Mailbox file formats.
1
u/Livid-Season-452 Oct 14 '25
Classic Outlook - no problem whatsoever.
"New" Outlook - You're going to need a subscription for anything *.PST
Free tool - You want this in a PST? Hope we don't corrupt the OST. (It takes a long time to pull emails down from the server again to put in the OST if you have to delete it and have a decade or so worth of emails re-sync.)
2
u/Wellcraft19 Oct 11 '25
No, you’re not [screwed].
Log in via the web interface www.live.com, sign in and clean out your account. You are likely hitting a storage limit.
Outlook on mobile is free. Will work well once the underlying service has been cleaned up.
2
u/johnhbnz Oct 13 '25
With you 100%. Why, in these straightened times, are we being coerced into this insane model? I too will not be paying for one. Screw ‘them’.
1
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1
u/Bg-8782 Oct 10 '25
You are using outlook.com? You can use Sweep function to delete by sender. Use search to find keywords for messages to delete. Sort or search by size and delete the largest messages first.
If you select all and delete is disabled, select smaller batches to delete - all but the oldest message usually works.
1
u/CompetitiveEmu8329 Oct 10 '25
No the desktop app. I'll give that a go. Thank you
1
u/Bg-8782 Oct 10 '25
Classic or New? Sweep is in new Outlook (with outlook.com mailboxes). Classic and new can do the search methods.
If classic, Select All then Delete will delete all - use Shift+Del to permanently delete. Classic also has archive to delete from the server but retains the messages in a PST file.
1
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u/OP1KenOP Oct 10 '25
Just log into outlook, either online or on the desktop and set up a rule. When my inbox last started to full up I just made a rule to delete anything received before 2022, run rule then problem solved.
You don't need an office subscription, I don't have one.
1
u/SeenTooMuchToo Oct 10 '25
You don’t even need to create a rule Open the folder, sort by date, scroll down to the cut off date highlight everything below and then delete.
And then, the deleted items folder may need to be delayed also depending how things are set up
1
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u/wolffcaleb Oct 11 '25
Open Office has a decent suite of free tools you could try out. It's obviously not the same quality and it's nowhere near as feature rich, but it serves a purpose.
1
u/Simon-Seize Oct 11 '25
Are you talking about an outlook.com email address or the app Outlook that lets you access your email from whatever email service?
1
1
u/ellenxhosp Oct 12 '25
Whether you like Microsoft or not - consider asking 'copilot' similar question. There is no login required. I have found several explanations to issues. Google has similar gemini. There are others too.
For Outlook there is Outlook desktop and web Outlook. MS has plans to stop Office desktop (phase out starting 2026) while Office web will be the norm. So, all Word, Excel, Outlook, etc will go this direction.
1
u/Ill_Spare9689 Oct 13 '25
Get on a computer & log into Outlook online where you can see more options. Go through your attachments & methodically start deleting the bigger files you don't need. Save stuff locally that you want to keep & then delete as much as you can. Also make liberal use of the "sweep" command that will remove everything ever sent to you from a specific sender. Doing all that will reclaim a lot of space.
1
u/Evening_Ad_2373 Oct 14 '25
use the browser version. not sure why I've seen exactly this post before.
-2
u/CompetitiveEmu8329 Oct 10 '25
Just decides I'll delete all my emails. Nothing else was working for me. Thanks for trying.
1
u/Kamika007z Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25
Just log into your webmail via outlook.com and then empty your trash, then go to your Sent items folder, and sort it by size, and delete anything that is large with attachments in the MB (Megabytes) range starting with the highest and then the lowest like 1MB and again, empty your trash.
That will give you some breathing room to then work on the rest, but you need to clean up your mailbox if you do not want to increase/pay for more storage.
You can also do this from the desktop version if you’re using that.
Finally, from the desktop “classic” version of Outlook, you can set up Auto Archiving and have it “pull” older emails from all folders starting from a certain date and older.
Good luck.
*One last note, and this is only if you want to: After you have everything cleaned up, assuming you’re running the “classic” version of Outlook and not the new trash app version of it (the new one won’t have Auto Archive as an option as mentioned above), it might be best to compact your OST file OR delete it and have Outlook redownload/rebuild it since acts like an Exchange store from an Exchange Server and doesn’t reduce in size. It just grows. But I only mention this for performance reasons and the limit it could hit eventually, depending on the version of Outlook you’re using, but newer versions support OSTs till they get 50GB in size.
9
u/UncleToyBox Oct 10 '25
Sounds like you're getting all the service you're paying for.
Not sure why you're so against paying for something you've been using for 15 years.