By now all Hotmail users are probably aware of the Hotmail storage lift that was recently made to keep competitive against other free email service providers such as Yahoo! and AOL. Lately I have been really curious about how much storage is actually provided to users and what exactly the cap limit is for “ever-growing storage”. Well, after a little bit of research I think that I have found it. :]
Microsoft describes the change by saying “Your inbox capacity will automatically increase as you need more space.” Yet, of course there always has to be the small print but in the case it seems pretty easy to follow, “If your inbox surprises us [Microsoft] by suddenly and abnormally skyrocketing in size, you may get an e-mail from Windows Live Hotmail asking you to slow down, move e-mail from Windows Live Hotmail to your desktop, or to delete some old e-mails.”
After doing some research of my own I have come to the conclusion that your inbox does not necessarily “grow with you” but you have the allotted storage space available it’s just you have to get there properly, as noted in the paragraph above. I found it interesting that the allotted space is 500 GB as seen in the screenshot to the right. It personally gives me piece of mind knowing exactly what the storage limits are but it also now makes me curious what happens when an account reaches 500 GB, so I think it would be great if someone from the Hotmail team or if someone ever makes it to that much storage to let us know if it just makes you get rid of stuff or does it increase yet again.
As always feel free to leave any comments, questions or suggestions and I’ll get back to them as I usually do. =)
