It happened to me once a long time ago, and my colleagues, and now my brother-in-law’s Microsoft Office Outlook also hang or having extremely slow startup. This is what happens when you don’t archive or backup your email correspondence and let your main outlook.pst file burgeon into one big fat file!
So now what? You can’t start up your Office Outlook and you can’t access the important email correspondence. This is the simple (but slow) workaround. You need to create a new PST file, and then open the old PST file and prays that it will open, and slowly backup the files onto a new PST file.
- Look for the PST file, it is usually located in this folder below. You may need to unhide the hidden files and folder to access the folder.
- C:users{yourname}AppDataMicrosoftOutlook
- Rename the “outlook.pst” file, perhaps “outlook2.pst”
- Restart Office Outlook, it will create a new profile, if it can’t create a new profile, you may have to reinstall a fresh version over it to create a PST file. Other way is to copy an intact PST file from elsewhere into the above folder
- Once your Outlook has started up, goto File, Open, Oulook Data File, and open your renamed PST file (outlook2.pst as per above example)
- If you are able to open, then good, slowly copy or move the files over to your new PST file.
For most businesses, it is likely you would have thousands of correspondence. So for archiving purposes, you may want to create a year-by-year outlook PST file, call it outlook2010.pst for archive year 2010 messages, etc. Move the files over and pack it away for archiving.
Most of us don’t use the auto-archiving in the outlook, if you are the lazy type who don’t care so much about keeping your back up file tidy, you may use it to reduce the size of the main outlook.pst file to avoid this problem. For me, I prefer to keep it neat and do the archiving manually, separating it to year-by-year archive. This helps to avoid the outlook PST file from ballooning and avoids the slow startup of Office Outlook program, or worse, the Office Outlook program hang.
Backing up your email messages
Because email correspondence are very important for your business especially when it comes to agreement and tracking down what has been said and agreed upon, it is crucial to have some kind of backup system or archiving system whether it is automated using the outlook archive or manually done. To reduce the impact of loss mail, another suggestion is to use gmail to pull the incoming POP3 mailbox. Gmail has a feature to read incoming POP3 mailbox and copy it into their mail servers. However for SMTP outgoing you will have manually create BCC to your Gmail account to save another copy. If you are too lazy to do that, then at least you still get half of your correspondence back up, but it is better than nothing.
So take heed to always archive your mail correspondence in your Office Outlook to avoid Outlook program hang or slow startup.
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