From 1 February 2023, Microsoft has changed what counts towards your cloud storage in OneDrive for personal subscriptions. In the past, email attachments were counted as part of your Outlook.com mailbox quota, but not as part of OneDrive. Now, email attachments in Outlook.com will be counted as part of your OneDrive data allowance.

Although this change does not affect your Outlook mailbox storage amount (presumably Microsoft mean for emails messages themselves), going forward your OneDrive storage will be used up by email attachments as well as its own contents. Microsoft recommends sharing a link to a file already saved in OneDrive rather than sharing the file itself via email, in order to minimise the impact on your data allowance. This will also avoid duplicate files being saved.

Microsoft has also announced changes to Microsoft 365 Personal or Microsoft 365 Family subscribers from 30 November 2023. After this date, these plans will no longer allow personalised email addresses using a domain associated with their Outlook.com account. To do this you will need to upgrade to a paid Microsoft 365 Business subscription. Existing personalised email addresses will not be affected, although if they are removed after this date then they will not be able to be restored.

Both these changes are likely Microsoft encouraging users to move to paid subscriptions in order to benefit from features such as larger cloud storage quotas and personalised email addresses. The announcement from Microsoft is also ambiguous as it does not address the following:

• Whether these changes impact free Outlook.com and OneDrive accounts, which have a small storage quota (5GB), and will be impacted much sooner/quicker.
• If email attachments from Outlook.com will be browsable from OneDrive, seeing as they are now technically stored there.
• If additional free storage will be added to either Outlook.com and/or OneDrive free accounts and personal subscriptions in order to assuage these changes for end users.