Outlook is the largest consumer of memory on my desktop. The .pst file
is now .5 gig. To address the size of this file I have routinely
offloaded old emails to CD. I recently performed such an effort and
deleted all the items offloaded in the active .pst file, however, the
file is still .5 gig. Why? I cut out 80% of the emails/files stored.
How can I get the .pst file to a management size?

Hello mathewgilmore,

And thank you for your question.

The answer is very simple. Outlook stores your messages in a database.
Even when the messages have been removed, space is still allocated
until the database has been compacted.

Annoyances.org at http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/win2000/t1015304585
, shows the following:

"...can someone explain why an outlook.pst file is still very large
(165mb) after deleting everything from within outlook? ...

I don't know anything about the structure of pst files, but as they
are essentially database files, then deleting the data from them
doesn't necessarily make them any smaller as the space that was used
for the data is still taken up until you compact it.

Did you compact it? In Outlook, display Properties for your Inbox root
(not the Inbox folder), choose "Advanced...," and "Compact Now." If
you're offline, you can do it from your Outlook profile, under
Properties for the Microsoft Exchange Server. "

This article at Exchange and Outlook Adminstrators,
http://www.exchangeadmin.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=24017 ,says:

"If you've been archiving to the same archive.pst file for a long time
(e.g., since Outlook 97 came out), you might want to search your
computer for all .pst files and check their sizes. If a .pst file
exceeds 2GB, Outlook can't open it. The pst2gb.exe tool, which you can
get from Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS), can help you
recover most of your data, but you probably won't get it all back. Try
to keep any .pst files well under that 2GB limit. To maintain
reasonably sized .pst files, delete messages you don't need to keep,
empty the Deleted Items folder regularly or automatically, and
occasionally compact the .pst file to remove the empty space that
remains after you delete items. To compact the .pst file, right-click
your folder's top level (Outlook Today if it's your main data store),
click Advanced, and click Compact Now. Unfortunately, you can't
schedule the compact function or launch it from a command line."

Interesting.

And, on this page, http://www.exchangeadmin.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=22164
, they say:

"Compacting a .pst file rewrites the file and removes messages that
Outlook has marked as deleted. Because .pst files store two copies of
each message (one as plaintext, one as Rich Text Format—RTF),
compacting these files can result in significant space savings, so
it's worth teaching your users how to do it themselves. In Outlook
2002, go to File, Data File Management to open a dialog box that lists
all your .pst files. Select the file you want to compress, click
Settings, then click Compact Now to actually perform the compression.
Outlook automatically compacts a .pst file when the file reaches a
certain (but undocumented) size; however, for automatic compaction to
occur, your PC must be completely idle."


If, by chance, you have a version of Outlook that has the "COMPACT"
function located in another place, you should easily be able to find
the information you need by searching the index of the Help File for
'compact".

I trust this will help you recover your lost file space and keep you
Outlook files trimmed.

Best regards,

-=clouseau=-

Excellent answer. Thanks for providing a detailed solution. My computer is saved!