Archiving emails in Outlook 2003
Over the years, Outlook (2003) has been slower and slower to start up for me, and even to work with. I have for long been thinking that the problem may be the size of the message database (the .pst file), since I never delete my emails (I realized today I have emails from 2001). But I have never done anything to it - until today!
The first thing I did was to remove old emails from the regular .pst (the file that is used by Outlook to store emails and that is used by Outlook so you can read old emails). It turned out Outlook had a neat feature called "Archive", available from the File menu. Using that, I archived old emails into two folders, one for emails older than 2006, and one for the year 2006.
The old emails are not vanished, they can easily be found and you can read them at any time (as long as you have access to the files where you stored the archived emails). From the File menu, click Open and then "Outlook Data File".
Anyhow, Outlook was still not any faster. So I went to the directory where the .pst file is located. This location can by the way be found from the "Data File Management" option on the File menu.
At this time I realized that the file has not shrunk anything. It was still as large as before I archived any emails. Hmm...what to do now? I know that many applications using binary data files to store data have some way to compact the files (Microsoft Access for example) to reduce the size. So perhaps Outlook has this too?
Of course, right there in "Data File Management", I clicked the Settings button and there is an option to compact the file (the Compact button). This reduced the file size of my Outlook.pst from 300 mb down to 25 mb. Closing and opening Outlook, as well as working with Outlook, was not much faster! What a relief.
Published 2007-08-18 20:00 GMT+0100 by Kristofer Gafvert