Outlook Express Funny Problem

Scann69 · Dec 22, 2005

I've been using Outlook Express since 2003 and i've been storing email into it without bothering much until recently i decided to see how much capacity of my HDD it has taken and to my surprise, my emails has reached 4.4GB in total.

Looking at it, i decided to delete those in the "Deleted Items" & "Sent" folder which seems most logical but it seems that the size does not get any smaller at all. In fact, it's still the same. How do i permanently delete those in "Deleted Items" and "Sent" folder to reduce the size of my total emails?

tom10167 · Dec 22, 2005

HOLY ****IN SIG!

Your sig is WAY too big man, get rid of the size=+2 and you should be all right.

Anyways, as far as your problem goes, just search for files and look for *.dbx and delete the "deleted items" file.

Scann69 · Dec 22, 2005

tom10167 said:
HOLY ****IN SIG!

Your sig is WAY too big man, get rid of the size=+2 and you should be all right.

Anyways, as far as your problem goes, just search for files and look for *.dbx and delete the "deleted items" file.

Thanx for the prompt reply. I've deleted the "Deleted Item" and that is fine but for the "Sent" folder, i intend to keep all my 2005 emails while deleting all the 2003 & 2004 emails. I've deleted the old mails in outlook express but when i go to the store folder, it still shows a whooping 1.6GB. Seems like even after i delete the old mails, the .dbx file does not get smaller in size. How do i work around this?

tom10167 · Dec 22, 2005

Hm... I'm not quite sure what you're saying.

You deleted deleted items.dbx? ...for the sent folder, you intend to keep all of your 2005 e-mails.... ok so you haven't deleted them from OE yet.
You've deleted your 03 and 04 mails in OE but when you go to the store folder? What store folder? Is that where the .dbx files are?

Either way, delete the .dbx files. They get rewritten, so it's all right.

Scann69 · Dec 22, 2005

tom10167 said:
Hm... I'm not quite sure what you're saying.

You deleted deleted items.dbx? YES ...for the sent folder, you intend to keep all of your 2005 e-mails.... ok so you haven't deleted them from OE yet. YES
You've deleted your 03 and 04 mails in OE but when you go to the store folder? What store folder? The store folder where all the .dbx files are stored. Is that where the .dbx files are?

Either way, delete the .dbx files. They get rewritten, so it's all right.

Answer in red above.
i deleted the deleted item.dbx and it gets rewritten which is ok but i cannot delete sent.dbx cos there are some emails in there which i still need to keep as record. The problem is that those emails that i delete from "sent" does not seem to effect the total size of the sent.dbx file at all. In theory, when u delete somethings, the total size becomes smaller but not for OE...that's the funny things

tom10167 · Dec 22, 2005

Right, when you "permanently delete" something in OE, all you do is hide it.

What I would do is take whatever sent e-mails you want to keep send them to another e-mail account you have(A Yahoo account takes like 5 minutes to set up) Just forward all the e-mails to your new address and then delete sentitems.dbx.

Scann69 · Dec 22, 2005

tom10167 said:
Right, when you "permanently delete" something in OE, all you do is hide it.

What I would do is take whatever sent e-mails you want to keep send them to another e-mail account you have(A Yahoo account takes like 5 minutes to set up) Just forward all the e-mails to your new address and then delete sentitems.dbx.

Hehehehe. That is a good idea....except i have 2107 emails that i want to keep in my "Sent.dbx" :bang head

There has to be a better way to do this.....wonder why OE just can't calculate the size correctly.

Thanx anyway. Hope somebody has similar problem and managed to solve it.

tom10167 · Dec 22, 2005

Yeah. Approaching 5am.

Ok. So when you open OE right now, how many e-mails are in your Deleted items folder, and how many are in sent items?

What I'm thinking is, take the sent items you don't want to keep, and delete them from OE, and then go to delted items and permanently delete them and then delete "deleted items.dbx" again.

Or did you already do that?

Scann69 · Dec 22, 2005

Yup. Done that already. The's the funny thing about it. I've deleted what i don't need from "Sent Item" then go to the store folder and delete "Delete Item.dbx". "Delete Items.dbx rewrite itself and so is not a problem as the file size is back to about 178kb. It's the "Sent Item" file size that does not decrease even after deleting like 2000 ++ emails. Sick OE

tom10167 · Dec 22, 2005

Yeah ok, at least we're on the same page. I'm sure someone will have a better answer throughout the main day today, I'm not an expert with OE.

Know Nuttin · Dec 22, 2005

Compact them. It sounds like the same thing as pst files with Outlook. They just grow and grow until you run a compact command on them.

In OE, go to File -> Folder -> Compact All Folders.

Scann69 · Dec 22, 2005

Found Solution

Ha, i figured it out

Thanx for helping out guys. But even after archiving all my old emails, 2005 emails itself still gives me 2.2GB :eh?:

Hope OE don't crash on me or i'll be one year behind in terms of work

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

threeme2189 · Dec 23, 2005

OE sucks.

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