My Microsoft Outlook keeps hanging and my mail folder is less than a GB. Is it time that I break my data into other folders?

Thanks

If it keeps hanging, yes. I archive mine in CD sizes, so that each file can fit on a CD.

Have you compacted them and all that? Back them up first of course.

Before I moved to Thunderbird I had 4 PST files, all 2Gb and larger. Now I imported them all into Thunderbird I still have all my mail and attachments and a mail folder of just 900Mb. Obviously the way Microsoft stores them is less than efficient.

To keep down the size of your local mail, you need to compact them periodically. At least with Eudora and Outlook, new messages get appended to the end of the file, while empty space for messages which are deleted or moved are not overwritten. Compacting the mailbox eliminates those gaps.

Perhaps Mozilla and/or Thunderbird do this automatically, and I don't doubt they may have a more efficient compression algorithm, but it's also possible that the dramatic savings comes from the import process simply stripping out the offending empty gaps.

As far as size of Outlook PST files, 1GB used to be the upper limit, but I thought it had been expanded with Outlook 2003. I archive every six months or so and none of the files is over 1GB, but I only have about three open at any given time.

Mine is 1.8GB on Outlook 2002 SP2. Works FINE.

Microsoft offically supports PSTs upto 2GB on Outlook '97-'02. The newest release of Outlook, Microsoft has retooled how PSTs contain mail and I don't think the new PSTs have a supported size limit.

Correct... they are now unicode-based and no 2GB limit.

But, if you upgraded to 2003 from an earlier version, it stays as a 97-02 file. You need to save that one somewhere, create a new 2003 PST, and import the old mail.

I have 4.3GB. The official pre-2003 limit is 2GB but our tech support folks always kept everyone under 1GB - they said that was where they started noticing problems.

My main pst is 3.9Gb in the new Outlook 2003 UNICODE format.

Sounds like you have a bad/evil server. If you're using exchange, consider switching to cached mode.

I've got gigs upon gigs of mail in my pst with no issues whatsoever.

Also, try running the "scanpst.exe" tool hidden deep inside the application data folder of your "my documents". Just do a search for it on your PC. I used to run it bi-weekly before moving to Mozilla and it would keep finding errors....

Been burned already once by the 2GB database file size bug. Fortunately I didn't lose much because I had a backup plan in place. You regularly backup your email database right? I now use a different application than to trust micro$oft with my email! @:-)

Which begs the question:
Why on earth do you trust a flawed approach of software design that holds all your emails in a database file that can get so big??? All you need is one sector on your hard drive to go bad, and there goes MB or GB worth of information! Yeah, they supply a utility to repair the database, but what if the database gets corrupted beyond what this utility can fix?

Fixed the problem! Wonder why they would had such a good tool.

BTW, my mail files have been upgraded over time, so I suspect I do have some size limit. When I get a few extra minutes I think I will do some mail re-org.

Thanks

I never found out why it isn't just included on the start menu either, the only time it points to it is when the mail file is really really corrupted, then it'll say "run scanpst.exe", doesn't even tell you where to find it...

Glad this helped.