Outlook 2000 won't compact .pst file

I run Outlook 2000 under Windows 98 SE for email. Recently it seems to have stopped compacting the Personal Folders (.pst) file. When I try to force the issue by pressing the “Compact Now” button in the Personal Folders Properties dialog box, I get a brief popup saying that compaction is in progress, but the end result is not only no reduction in file size, but occasionally even a small increase! And this is after I delete a folder several MB in size. My .pst file is getting too large to back up easily as a result. Anyone know what’s going on and how to correct it?

 

How large is your outlook.pst file? Microsoft doesn't brag about it, but gets unstable and can flat out die at around 2 gigabytes size, and compacting won't help any at all.

See here for good ways to manage Outlook's files:

Woody's Office Watch

 

Mine's only 109 MB, but I've been backing it up to a 100 MB Zip disk, so when it crossed that size threshhold I began paying a lot more attention to Outlook response to my attempts to manage the size. Compaction worked well to get the size below 100 for awhile, but somewhere along the line it began to fail.

 

If backing up to zip is important to you, consider archiving your older stuff. The archive is a separate file that can go on a second zip disk. Compacting is basically compressing, and the stuff you've already compacted can't be squeezed any smaller. As you're nearing your critical size limit, you're likely compacting more often, and less of the fresh stuff is compactable. Short of going to a larger storage media, that's probably all you can do.

That Woody's article tells you how to set it up so you have easy access to the older archived stuff, and you can have more than one archive file when it gets too full for just 2 zip disks.

 

I first noticed the problem when I'd empty the Deleted Items folder (with, say, 4 MB of stuff in it) and then do a Compact Now and the file size would remain unchanged rather than drop by 4MB. Sounds like the file is "old" in Woody's sense. I'll try his remedy to renew it Thanks for pointing his article out to me.

 

Compaction is only half the problem

Compacting your mailbox is probably only half the problem -- I bet you've got lots of attachments that are just sucking up space.

You might want to check out PSTCompactor (http://www.PSTCompactor.com)... it can zip them up (your attachments that is) and then force Outlook to compact the mailbox. There's a home user version for $24.95.

 

mohitstellar, welcome to MajorGeeks. Before you post, please note the dates of the posts. plancaster asked for help more than 6 years ago. He might not be using the same computer!

 

Thanks mohitstellar and also welcome to MG. I was surprised to get an email alert on this thread. plodr is right. I long since then got a new computer (that is now quite old) and have been using Outlook 2003 forever and understand .pst compaction logic much better than 7 years ago. Thanks anyway for posting. I appreciate the spirit of your response..