Compacting Personal E-mail Folders (MS Outlook)

[blunomore]

The IT guy who installed and set up my PC explained to me that, every now and again, I should compact my Personal Folder.

He explained that, as we delete e-mails from time to time, there are 'spaces' left in the Personal Folder, which takes up memory (please note this is my lay person's explanation of what he said )

My questions to you -

1. Generally, speaking, does this compacting process take a long time ? I did it earlier today, and it kept saying "Compacting ...." without ending the function. It seemed to take very long and I do not know if that is 'normal' ?

2. Whilst compacting, is it prudent to close all other windows and not continue with other applications or functions on the PC ?

Thanks !

[bradlesliect]

Hi,

Below is a link to MS Support that explains how to compact. wrt how long its going to take, I think that is dependant on the size of the pst file. It recommended that the PC not be used for anything that can cause strain in the CPU and/or memory while its busy

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289987

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291645

Hope this helps and good luck

[HavocXphere]

Yes can take long 1st time.

IT guy is pretty much correct.

Doesn't matter what you do RE other apps, just don't interupt it/crash outlook that will mess up your emails.

You can also archive emails which speeds things up. Maybe have IT guy do this...one can mess it up.

[bradlesliect]

Another suggestion would be to create backup files of the pst and delete the stuff that is currently in there cos its already in backup? Will this also not save space? There's always been a debate between archive vs. compact vs. backup.

[murraybiscuit]

yeah, this can take hours.
did it on my wife's pc a while back. problem is the progress window isn't very good at giving you feedback and can look like it's stuck. especially when you have 4gb of mail - then you want to run it over a weekend.
if your mail is exchange based, and storage limits aren't an issue, archiving isn't really necessary, but if your network has a limit and you've exceeded it, you've got to archive locally and back it up.

my general philosophy with outlook is to keep the inbox/calendar etc as one pst/ost and then archive read/old mail in a separate pst.
i'm not sure if outlook still has the issue, but in 2003 and lower, if your pst got bigger than 1 - 2gb it could corrupt and you could lose all your mail.
so you should really back up your local pst's if you have any local-only archives.

it all gets complicated. which is why i now just use gmail and connect via imap. thank goodness i don't need an exchange server any more.
it's a bit slow, but it saves me pst incompatibility issues, and allows me to easily change mail clients and set up mail on different devices.