Improving The Performance Of Outlook

By Scott McManus

Compacting Outlook 2000 personal folder files.

You may be forgiven for thinking that when you archive your outlook folders that Outlook would also compact the personal folder file. (Usually a *.pst or *.ost file located in the Microsoft\outlook local application data folder for your login identity).

However Outlook does not release the space used by a deleted or archived item. Hence your PST file keeps growing month to month. I recently found that my file was 162 Meg so I decided to make a backup copy of the file and then archive it. I found the archive to be 76 Megs and expected a suitable reduction in the size of my PST file. Alas it remained the same size. I found the following ‘hard to find’ option.

By right clicking on the Outlook Today (Personal Folders) Item (figure 1) in the Folders View area and then selecting ‘Properties for "Personal Folders", I was presented with the following menu box. (Figure 2)

From there select ‘Advanced’ where you can find the option for compacting all of the folders that come under the Personal Folder. (Figure 3). After Compaction my PST file was reduced to only 83 Megs.

Other Outlook Tips From GR Include

Try running SCANPST.EXE once every month or two.  This program should remove any errors in your mailbox.pst file.

Do not forget to backup mailbox.pst or outlook.pst or *.pst to another computer or a tape or a cd as this can easiliy be imported into another version of Outlook after your computer crashes.

When transferring from one PC to another, it is possible to export all the email rules.  This can save you a lot of time.  You will of course want to import the mailbox.pst file into your new version of Outlook.