When it comes to email, storage space can fill up very quickly, and even exceed our allotted quota.  But when  this happens, at least when it comes to Outlook, the first temptation is to go up to the next tier.  But the drawback with this is that it will cost more for you to do this.  In this article, we look at some ways to increase the size of your mailbox, without incurring those extra expenses.

The Tips

Here are some suggestions:

1. Modify the quotas:

This metric simply reflects how much actual storage an end user’s mailbox has.  Typically, when 98% of storage has been reached, he or she will receive a warning to do something so that the amount will not be exceeded.  A trick that the email administrator can use is to segregate out those end users who use email more versus those who do not.  With the latter, you can set up a lower quota limit, and whatever is left available from that can be used to increase the storage size of the former.

2. Use archiving:

With this technique, you are not actually deleting email.  You are simply storing old messages in a different location, which is not actively used.  Thus, by archiving your older emails, you will increase the size of your allotted amount for your email, without incurring any extra costs.  Typically, depending upon the type of M365 plan that you have, you will get up to either 50 Gb or 100Gb of archiving storage, which is actually quite large.  If absolutely necessary, you can even get up to 1.5Tb of archiving space, but this is only available for the top end licensing plans, and this will of course incur more expense.  But the advantage here is that once the 100Gb allotment size has been reached, another 100Gb is provisioned at no extra cost.  This is known as “Auto Expanding.”

3. Get rid of stuff:

Probably the best way to add more space to your email account is to simply delete those emails that are deemed to be non-critical.  Outlook has a way of marking emails as critical or not, thus making it easier for you to decide which emails should be deleted.  If you really don’t want to delete any of your email messages, then the next option here would be to back them up into another storage account in M365.

What To Do First

As the administrator of your company’s M365 subscription, there are certain steps that you need to take first in order to give your end users plenty of time to decide what they want to do with their emails as they reach their storage limits.  Some of these are:

1. Set up threshold warnings:

As reviewed earlier, set up warnings that will be delivered to the end users as they reach certain limits in their storage size.  For example, you can set up warnings for 50%, 75%, 90%, etc.  Also inform your employees that if the do not take action, their mailboxes could become disabled.

2. Set up sending limits:

With this, once the end user has reached their maximum storage capacity, they will not be able to send any more emails, but they can still receive them.  In other words, they cannot reply to them.

3. Set up sending and receiving limits:

Under this scenario, the end user can’t send or receive emails.  This should only be done if they have not done anything to free up storage space.

What Are The Storage Limits?

At this point, you might be wondering just what the storage limits are.  The following matrix reviews this, for the various M365 plans:

Conclusions

If you need help or have questions about increasing your mailbox sizes, contact us today.