Dear Alumni,
We are writing to inform you about important updates regarding your Microsoft alumni account storage due to changes to storage offerings across Microsoft 365 Education that affect higher education institutions worldwide.
Effective November 30, 2025, the new storage limits for all HKUST alumni accounts (@connect or @alumni) will be as follows:
- Email Quota: Adjusted to 2 GB.
- OneDrive: No storage will be available. All data will ultimately be PURGED and will NOT be recoverable.
To help you prepare for this change and avoid data loss, please take the following actions before November 30, 2025:
Actions Required:
- Email:
Review your storage and delete unnecessary emails. To enhance performance and free up space, emails sent or received more than one month will be automatically moved to the Archived Mailbox. Emails in the Archived Mailbox will not count against your mailbox limit and will remain accessible in Outlook. Deleted emails older than 30 days will be permanently removed.
Consider setting up email forwarding from your HKUST alumni account to your personal email account. If your mailbox is full, please free up some space before setting up email forwarding. You can also update your personal email here, which will be used for our future communications.
- OneDrive:
For alumni with storage ≤ 100GB or fresh graduates on or before July 28, 2025 : Transfer important data from OneDrive to external drives or personal cloud services such as Google Drive or Dropbox. After November 30, 2025, you will still have READ-DOWNLOAD-DELETE-ONLY access to OneDrive, until March 2026. After this, content in your OneDrive will not be recoverable, and Microsoft 365 Online Apps will not be usable.
For alumni with storage > 100GB: Your account is currently in READ-DOWNLOAD-DELETE-ONLY mode due to exceeding the 100GB limit as of February 1, 2024. You can still access your OneDrive until March 2026. After this, content in your OneDrive will not be recoverable, and Microsoft 365 Online Apps will not be usable.
For more information on managing this change, please refer to the ITSO’s Microsoft 365 Storage Global Reduction guideline.
If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact the IT Service Desk at cchelp@ust.hk or +852 2358 6200. If you need to retrieve your login details for your alumni account, please use the "Retrieve your username" or "Forgot password" options.
Thank you for your attention.
