How do I get Windows Live Mail to increase my storage allocation?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #87, I look at ways to sidestep size limitations in an online
email account.

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Windows Live Mail storage

Well, it’s interesting. My assistant did a little bit of research and according to Microsoft, your inbox limit should actually automatically increase as you use it.

If you are receiving a lot of email with large attachments, and your inbox limits aren’t increasing fast enough, they actually suggest downloading those large attachments; saving them to your PC and then deleting them from the Live Mail servers.

I’ll include the link to the article that they provided. It talks about exactly this scenario.

Use your computer

I actually have a different take on this.

Whenever you’re using an email service that has some kind of artificial limit and you’re bumping into that limit (because you’re keeping your email on that service’s servers), I strongly recommend that you instead look into using a desktop email program. Download all of your email to your own desktop using the POP3 protocol and then you’ll have as much space as you want on your PC.

Obviously, you can add as much hard drive space to that machine as you want. Clearly, it’s virtually unlimited the amount of email that you can deal with on your own PC – when you’re faced with a limit from your ISP.

It provides a backup

And ultimately, when you think about it, I also recommend using that desktop PC email program to (at a minimum) backup your email.

Remember, if your email is only in one place, it’s not backed up. If that one place happens to be your email service and you lose access to your account, then all of your email is gone in an instant.

So, back it up and while you’re at it, consider using a desktop email program to potentially bypass or sidestep any size limitations that an email service might be imposing.

(Transcript lightly edited for readability.)