Microsoft Outlook has gotten a bad rap over the years. It’s a decent program that, as of now, no one has improved on. But millions of people use it on a daily basis. They use Outlook to store their email, organize their phone book, keep on top of pressing tasks, and store all their appointments. In short, Outlook is the electronic version of a personal organizer, and so people tend to lose their minds when something goes wrong with Outlook.
This guide is all about keeping Outlook running smoothly. It won’t help you when Outlook starts misbehaving – the whole point of this post if to keep that from happening in the first place. So if you’re a big Outlook user, read on and take the following advice to heart:
Get Rid Of Any Add-Ons You No Longer Need: There are thousands of “plug-ins” or “add-ons” for Outlook. There are plug-ins that allow you to synchronize Outlook data with your PDA or mobile phone, plug-ins that allow Outlook to download RSS feeds, plug-ins that find and remove duplicate emails, plugs-ins that let you organize mail in different ways that Outlook’s native paradigm, plug-ins that allow you to encrypt emails, plug-ins that send Event Reminders from your Calendar to an email address… the list is almost endless. Some of these plug-ins might cause security holes. Some of them might be poorly written and cause errors or reduce Outlook’s performance. All of them slow Outlook down and make the program use more RAM. So if you haven’t used a particular plug-in in a long time, get rid of it by uninstalling the plug-in via the Add\Remove Programs applet in Control Panel.
Remove Attachments: One of the handiest things about email is that you can attach files to emails. Likewise, one of the most irritating things about email is that you can attach files to emails. It’s great when someone emails you a desperately needed spreadsheet, but it can be annoying when a friend sends you an email with 20MB worth of vacation photos attached. Save the attachments to a folder and delete the emails to reclaim wasted storage space (and, if you’re using PST files, improve your performance). You can organize the email in your Outlook folders by size by right-clicking the “Arranged By:” bar at the top of each folder and choosing “Size”; by default, Outlook will show the largest emails at the top of the list. If you have several folders, you can right-click the main data store folder and select Properties > Folder Size; the box that pops-up will show the the size of all of your Outlook folders on that store, and you’ll be able to quickly find oversized folders and delete the attchments therein. Lastly, if you want to delete an attachment but save the original email, double-click the email to open it, then right-click on the attachment and select “Remove”.
Empty the “Deleted Items” and “Sent Items” Folders: Lots of folks don’t know that messages in your “Deleted Items” folder still count against your Exchange Mailbox’s size limit. They do. So empty out that folder every once in a while, OK? Also, move the emails in your “Sent Items” folder to an archive PST every so often. This goes double if you’ve been forwarding emails with attachments. If your Mom sent you some pictures and you forwarded them to your sister, you still have the original email from Mom in your Inbox, right? So go ahead and delete the copy your forwarded to your sister.
Archive Your Calendar and Tasks: Most people easily grasp the idea of moving emails from one folder to another. Moving Calendar items and Tasks to an archive folder? Not so much. I worked for several companies in the past that used Outlook’s Calendar as their main scheduling application. I also used a program called FusionOne to synchronize my work and home calendars. As a result, my Calendar was huge (16MB) and was jammed full of items dating back to 1998. While it’s sometimes fun to go back and see what service calls I had on this date in 1999, or find out who the Pittsburgh Steelers played on 11/05/2000, or see when I went to the dentist back in 2001, it’s not only not relevant to me today, it also slowed down the performance of Outlook in general and the Calendar in particular. To move old Calendar items to an archive, simply create a new PST file (if you don’t have an archive file already) then click on File > Archive. Click the “Archive this folder and all subfolders:” button and select only the Calendar in your main mailbox. Choose a date in the “Archive items older than” box, make sure that the correct PST file is selected in the “Archive File:” box, then click the “OK” button. All the items in your calendar prior to the date you selected will be moved to the PST file you selected. So you’ll still be able to access them, but it won’t slow down the calendar in your main data store. To move old Tasks, follow the same steps as before, but this time select “Tasks” instead of Calendar.
Keep Less Than 5000 Items In Any One Folder: I used to have an Outlook folder called “Archived Email”, and in this folder I put every single email that I ever wanted to keep. At one point, I had over 17,000 emails in this one folder. And every time I’d click on it, Outlook would freeze for 30 seconds to a minute before showing the folder’s contents. Microsoft recommends that you keep no more than 5,000 items in any one folder; this is partly a reliability issue, but it’s mostly a performance one. I decided to divide up the “Archived Email” folder by year, and so I created several subfolders with names like “1998”, “1999”, “2000”, and so on. I then moved all the emails from each year into each folder, and now Outlook is much snappier when opening my email archives. As a bonus, dividing the emails by year actually made searching easier for me, since I now can click on a folder and don’t have to navigate my way through 17,000 emails to find the one I want. You don’t have to divide your folders by year – you could do it by person or by project, or however the heck you want to do it. Just try to keep the number of items per folder less than 5000.
Use Multiple PST files: Before Outlook 2003 came along, PST file were limited to 2GB in size. Since some folks like to save each and every email they get, it was a common occurrence for people to hit the 2GB limit – especially since Outlook didn’t provide any notification that you were approaching that limit. Outlook 2003 changed the PST format from ANSI to Unicode, which means that Outlook 2003\2007 PST files can now be 20GB in size (or more). However, while I can totally see why people would want a single archive file for all of their emails, you’ll find that Outlook performs better with multiple PST files instead of one gigantic one. You can create new PST file by clicking on File > New > Outlook Data File. You can then move items from one PST to another simply by dragging and dropping the files from one PST to another. You can divide the data up any way you want: one PST for personal emails and another for work email, one PST for “project A” and another for “project B”. However you want to do it is fine, just know that in all my experience, Outlook works better with 3 PST files that are 700MB each than 1 PST file that’s 2.1GB.
Compact Your Outlook Folders: Outlook uses two main file types for storing your information: Offline Storage Files (.OST, used in Exchange environments) and Personal Folders (.PST, used in non-Exchange environments, and for storing archived email in Exchange environments). What makes these files somewhat unique is that they’re actually database files. And what that means to you, the end user, is that, like most database files, OST\PST files don’t compress when you delete stuff from them. For example, let’s say you have a PST file that’s 400MB in size. You heed my advice and delete 200MB worth of attachments. Outlook reports that the folder size is 200MB, but if you go to
c:\Documents and Settings\Username\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
you’ll find that the PST file is still listed as being 400MB by Windows Explorer. What gives? Why the discrepancy? It’s due to the way databases work. They expand as needed, but don’t give up any unused space (called “whitespace”) until you expressly tell them to do so. So to improve performance, you’ll occasionally need to “compact” the size of your Outlook data files (especially after you delete an bunch of data). To do this, just right-click on a PST file and select Properties > Advanced > Compact Now (for OST files, the procedure is right-click Mailbox > Properties > Advanced > Advanced > Offline Folder Settings > Compact Now). You’ll find that Outlook’s a bit snappier after doing this little procedure.