I am desperate. I use my PC for working from home. I do most of my communications by e-mail.
I have been using an old 2000 version of Microsoft Outlook as part of Office 2000. On Friday it locked up, telling me that the file Outlook.pst was not accessible. I have always been careful to weed-out unnecessary e-mails and transfer them to subfolders so the actual Inbox didn’t become clogged (I know this can cause problems). However, several years of legitimate work e-mails have built up to a level that , unknown to me until now, caused a serious problem. When I tried to do delete some more e-mails following the most recent error message, I was unable to delete e-mails or even empty the ‘Deleted items’ folder.
I installed a new version of Outlook (with Office XP from 2003) but, when the new version of Outlook opens, it tries to restore my orignal settings and e-mails but give me the error message “unable to open the folder . The file C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Setting\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.pst has reached its maximum size. To reduce the amount of data in this file, select some items that you no longer need, then permantently delete them.”
I have since learnt that once a PST file gets to 2Gb (which mine has with all my work e-mails stored in various folders), it locks up and becomes unreadable my Outlook.
Now I can’t even open the new version of Outlook (I could earlier but now it won’t even open before giving me the above error message).
I have run a 2GB reduction tool and then the Windows Inbox Fix tool on the reduced PST file. I have several questions:
1) How can I “select some items that you no longer need, then permantently delete them” when I can’t even access them? I have tried opening the outlook.pst file but nothing seems to read it.
2) How can I replace my reduced (and, apparently, fixed) PST file with the corrupt old one? I have tried in Explorer but the the ‘Local Settings’ folder seems to be hidden when I look (otherwise, I’d try dragging the reduced folder to the appropriate location).
3) Alternatively, how can I open Outlook without it automatically trying to read the oversized, corrupted original oputlook.pst file (which actually stops it from opening?).
4) I did manage to export my messages from the old 2000 version of Outlook to Outlook Express (version 6). Can I export them back to Outlook without causing further problems?
I’m pretty desperate as I can’t wotk at the moment and would be very grateful for any advice or assistance (perhaps a link to a magical fix tool?).
Many thanks in anticipation.