Save Email Attachments to Clear Storage Space

Purpose

Attachments in emails often take up far more storage space than the email message themselves. To clear up storage space, you can save email attachments to a location outside of Outlook, such as OneDrive or SharePoint, before removing the file from Outlook. This will give you more space in your Outlook storage without losing the attached contents.

Note: Attachments can only be removed from the desktop version of Outlook. The filtering instructions work in Outlook Online, but not the attachment removal.

Video Tutorial

Procedure

Sort Emails by Size

  1. Above your inbox, select the filter button. For many, this will be set as By Date.

  1. In the "Sort by" section, select Size.

  1. After selecting Size, your emails will be re-sorted and categorized by their size (Enormous (>25 MB), Huge (10-25 MB), etc.).

Save/Remove Attachments

  1. Select the email which you wish to remove the attachment from.
  2. Select the drop-down icon beside the attachment you wish to remove and select Save As.
    • If the email has multiple attachments, you can select Save All Attachments instead of doing them one-by-one.

           

            

  1. Once saved, select the drop-down icon again and click Remove Attachment.
    • If the email contains multiple attachments, select the first attachment, press and hold the Shift key, then select the last attachment. Select Remove Attachment to remove all selected attachments.
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