Microsoft is inserting extra limits on the quantity of knowledge you’ll be able to retailer in OneDrive, starting in February of subsequent 12 months, and eradicating a major anonymity characteristic shortly thereafter.

According to an e mail despatched to customers, Microsoft will start counting attachments linked to your Outlook.com tackle in opposition to your knowledge cap starting February 1, 2023. (A replica of the e-mail was forwarded to PCWorld by an outdoor consultant of Microsoft, and referenced earlier by Windows Central.) That signifies that no matter attachments you might have saved in your current inbox haven’t counted as saved recordsdata till now, however will starting in February of subsequent 12 months.

“This update will not impact your Outlook.com mailbox storage amount,” Microsoft wrote. “However, this may reduce how much cloud storage you have available to use with your OneDrive. If you reach your cloud storage quota, your ability to send and receive emails in Outlook.com will be disrupted.”

Outlook.com solely permits a most of 20MB of recordsdata to be hooked up to an e mail, so it’s unlikely your e mail has a ton of attachments ready to depend in opposition to your cap. Go past that, and Microsoft encourages you to easily share a hyperlink to the file that you’ve saved in OneDrive, as a substitute.

By default, Microsoft supplies a terabyte of storage with every paid Microsoft 365 account, although customers have the choice to pay for added storage, too. While Google made headlines by counting just about each file saved in its cloud in opposition to your knowledge cap, Microsoft does a lot the identical factor—your pictures could also be accessed through the Photos or OneDrive app, for instance, however they’re already counted in opposition to your cap. (You can even tweak Google Photos to help reduce your data cap inside that service, too.) What Microsoft apparently hasn’t finished is depend generic Outlook.com e mail in opposition to the cap, but.

There’s one other change value figuring out about, too. It’s possible that you just don’t know in regards to the email aliases that you can create within Outlook.com, which might be why Microsoft is discontinuing them. But they’re a helpful characteristic: While you’ll use the identical e mail inbox, password, account settings, and contacts as your “real” e mail account, you’ll be able to create a separate alias to protect anonymity. Outlook (the e-mail shopper) lets you see e mail despatched particularly to that e mail at Outlook.com (the e-mail service). The alias can then be eliminated everytime you like—although doing so “deletes” it, completely.

Unfortunately, that helpful alias characteristic is being turned off in a few 12 months’s time, on November 30, 2023. But it’s not all unhealthy—solely the flexibility to create new aliases is being eliminated in a 12 months’s time. If you wish to create one earlier than then, you’ll be able to, and it’ll nonetheless work after the cutoff date. It is likely to be value creating just a few aliases earlier than then, simply to attempt it out and have a further choice when it goes darkish.