Clean up and speed up Outlook 2003
After 5 years on Outlook, my folder tree on the left is starting to look like a street in Bombay at rush hour… it is just getting out of hand.
Now, with some changes in our company structure and the summer coming to an end, it is time to clean that up and gain some speed again.
The first thing I have done now was to clean up really every mail, I do not need anymore. A lot of “Cron Daemon” and “Error” mails have been deleted today 
Then I started to create new PST files (Files -> New -> Outlook Datafile) for some tasks, which produce 20-40 mails a day. Paypal payments, signups and other administrative mails are going there now.
Additionally I have created a seperate folder for the german company and the US company to split that as well.
The good thing with the PST files is, that you can seperately close them. If you put all your archive mails into the default archive, you might want to consider to close it! You can open it any time again, if you need it. The “open” function under the File menu gives you the right link.
Now I have compressed the Outlook data files and voila, 100% faster!
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August 22nd, 2006 at 7:15 am
that is the best blog posting of 2006! thanks man!
October 27th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
Brilliant! I hadn’t thought of creating multiple PST files. I have over 40,000 e-mails dating back to 2001. I will now be splitting my accounts into separate PST files and starting “anew”. Great idea!
May 12th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
yeah, it defiantly works. My boss had email going back to 2000, datafile was over 8 gigs
July 8th, 2008 at 4:53 am
Thanks for the tip. Indeed speeds up outlook 2003 quite a lot when using different datafiles.