Recently, Microsoft made a change to their OneDrive terms. I’m sure it was a bug, but if your OneDrive becomes full, they then stop your Outlook emails from being received. I was receiving the warning when my OneDrive was 99% full but my email allowance was 3% full.

My Mum had set up OneDrive to sync her Photos and Desktop, and had dumped several GB of videos there when she only had a 5GB OneDrive limit.

I had told her to sort her files out. However, she isn’t even confident dragging and dropping files into different folders.

It’s always tough to explain problems to her, or for her to explain problems to me. She says she normally checks emails on her phone these days, rather than on her laptop, and she doesn’t use OneDrive on her phone – so she couldn’t make sense of my explanation. Her thought process was: “How could Onedrive on her laptop prevent Outlook from receiving emails on her phone?”

Then, when she kept on showing me the Gmail app, I told her that I couldn’t fix it in Gmail. Then she kept on saying I’d got it wrong, because it was Outlook and not Gmail that she was using. 

She uses an Outlook email account, but the Gmail app on her phone. She couldn’t seem to differentiate between the concept of an account and app with the same names.

It’s easy to take aspects like this for granted. What’s easy for me to understand is simply impossible for the non-technical person. In the age where pretty much everything is pushing for digital, it’s a big ask for the older generation to come on board without every step of the process being intuitive.

When I got to her house, she seemed adamant in clearing out old emails, and I kept on telling her that emails are small and it’s not the problem.

She also complained about a “train noise” which I said I would need to hear from myself because it’s an extremely weird statement.

Once I had sorted out the files on her laptop, and stopped OneDrive syncing files on her Desktop, I told her that the emails should come through. She claimed that it still wasn’t working, and was showing me by refreshing the emails by sliding her finger down.

“I get double emails”

Mum

“I thought you said you weren’t getting emails?”

Me

“no, that was before when I was getting the train noise”

Mum

I sent her an email, and it came through along with a notification sound.

“There it is! the train noise!”.

Mum

She was adamant it was never her notification sound, and to be fair, there was a different tone for text messages, so I don’t know if it was a Gmail-specific tone, but I couldn’t see an option in the settings.

Even when emails were coming through she still claimed they weren’t coming through. She said that she often gets around 20 emails a day but had only 4 come through; so “it wasn’t fixed”. I didn’t know how to prove how many she should have.

But what about the “double email” problem? I still needed to solve that before I left. So I asked if she knew how we could recreate it. She refreshed Gmail and pointed to the loading wheel. After a few seconds, another loading wheel appeared lower down and she said: “there! double emails“. So there wasn’t double emails – just double the loading wheels.

I asked why this was a problem to her, and she said she

“didn’t get double emails or the train noise until the Microsoft thing popped up”.

Mum

Who knows if it’s true or not, but it’s so hard to help her when she describes somewhat fictional problems using the wrong terminology.

For another Mum-story, see Mum’s Frozen Laptop Screen