There is a little trick to the way POP3 email programs like Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and Thunderbird store the email messages you receive. A “deleted message” is not really deleted! Did you know that?
All your email program does is to rewrite a few characters in the file in order to tell itself that a particular email has been “deleted.”
One particular marking in the file indicates that the email has been deleted, so the program shows it in the Trash folder. A different marking shows it has been deleted from the Trash folder. But, it really has not been removed from the big email storage files.
In Eudora (which I use), it is under Special / Compact Mailboxes. In Outlook Express, it’s found at File / Folder / Compact All Folders.
In Outlook Express, the process is similarly easy — File, Folder, Compact All Folders.
In Outlook, the process is much more complicated to compact one of its .pst files. The process, from the main Outlook Express window is to select File, Data File Management, select a file, click the Settings button, then click Compact Now button.
- On the main Outlook window, Click on File, then Data File Management.
- This will open a dialog box labeled "Outlook Data Files" — and Inbox, Deleted, Sent etc ARE NOT displayed or choices in this dialog box.
- In my case, the only folder shown has the name “Personal Folders”. I click on it to select it, then click on the Settings button. This opens another dialog box labelled Personal Folders.
- It has two buttons "Change Password…" and "Compact Now"
- Click "Compact Now" — it will take a while.
- Then click OK to close the dialog box.
Regardless of which email program you use, you need to Compact the Folders occasionally. Only in this manner are the emails actually deleted — and this is the only way that the email files and folders actually get smaller.
and
I cant delete anything from outlook express, from any folder. The deleted folder is empty after the last big deleting I did yesterday. I deleted about 6000 emails.
If I compact files however, OE deletes recent emails, ones that i want to keep.
I have 10,000 emails in the inbox. If I do Compact folders now, i will loose the most recent emails.
What should I do?
thanks!
Pam
Pam,
It’s time for you to create some folders and move some of the emails into them.
Whether you create folders like Family, with subfolders for sister, brother, etc, or folders for each hobby, or each aspect of a business, getting organized will help in more ways than one.
With 10,000 emails in the inbox, you could even be running into caps/maximums in the programming – I don’t know.
But, splitting the emails into multiple folders and not just keeping them all in the Inbox should help a lot.
Re the Deleted Items folder, sometimes it gets corrupted. The fix is to delete it and then let OE re-create it automatically the next time you start OE. You have to have OE closed before you can delete the Windows file that is OE’s Deleted Items folder.