How big is your .pst file?
Recently a client has been having challenges with their Outlook file and then they sent me an image of a message they’d received because Outlook had stopped working. The pst file was over the size limit.
I had explained previously the importance of deleting from the Sent folder, archiving regularly and generally maintaining the file but I guess it’s something that just isn’t thought about regularly and in fact, not until it crashes.
Unfortunately Outlook does have file limitations (you can’t let it go on forever) and whilst some say that 2gig is the recommended size I encourage people to consider keeping it at 1gig or less.
I restart a new pst file at the beginning of every year. Quite easy really. I rename the outlook.pst file to the year it’s for, i.e. outlook2008.pst (when Outlook is closed) and then when Outlook re-opens it will automatically recreate outlook.pst because it can’t find the other file. You can then use the import/export function to import your contacts list and any other folders you created which need to be kept. But don’t import the whole old file – otherwise you’re back where you were before.
This article at Microsoft will give you more information should you need to do further exploration.
