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  • covid purge

    From Ogg@VERT/CAPCITY2 to All on Thu Apr 8 22:48:00 2021
    Hello All!

    I use MS Outlook for email at my shop. Over a year has
    transpired since the covid stuff took over my life and I hadn't
    been feeling like keeping up with the pace of incoming emails
    that could normally be deleted. Sure enough, I was reaching the
    2GB limit that MS Outlook has with its email .PST files.

    My .PST file was at about 1.96GB

    From there, it wouldn't be long before incoming email and the
    ability to even delete emails would simply stop.

    My vendors would often send catalog details with images and
    attachments. 30% of the mail were messages over 100MB each!
    About 30% more were emails between 20MB up to 100MB. What a
    friggin freakshow email has become. Other messages had to do
    with covid policies and announcements.

    A lot of that sh*t simply had to go.

    So, I decided to dedicate most of my day to purging old
    material. Man.. it was so cathartic to simply delete most of
    the incoming messages from 2019 and 2020.

    I deleted over 1140 pieces of email, some not even read. But I
    still had to walk through each and every one to ensure that I
    wasn't deleting something like an invoice or a bill that I
    needed.

    Once the messages are deleted, the .PST file needs to be
    compacted to eliminate the "empty spaces" and obtain the true
    size of the file.

    The result was a cool reduction from 1.96GB to:

    Directory of C:\OUTLOOK Data

    08/04/2021 09:39 AM 1,351,549,952 august.pst

    That gives me some breathing room to grow again and ignore the
    next batch of incoming crap.

    --- OpenXP 5.0.49
    * Origin: Ogg's Dovenet Point (723:320/1.9)
    þ Synchronet þ CAPCITY2 * capcity2.synchro.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/Rlogin/HTTP
  • From MRO@VERT/BBSESINF to Ogg on Fri Apr 9 03:22:42 2021
    Re: covid purge
    By: Ogg to All on Thu Apr 08 2021 10:48 pm

    Hello All!

    I use MS Outlook for email at my shop. Over a year has
    transpired since the covid stuff took over my life and I hadn't
    been feeling like keeping up with the pace of incoming emails
    that could normally be deleted. Sure enough, I was reaching the
    2GB limit that MS Outlook has with its email .PST files.


    i just had to do that on all my accounts because they were getting so full. i used a program called email backup wizzard. let me know if you want it.
    ---
    þ Synchronet þ ::: BBSES.info - free BBS services :::
  • From Underminer@VERT/UNDRMINE to Ogg on Fri Apr 9 03:24:08 2021
    On 2021-04-08 8:48 p.m., Ogg wrote:

    I use MS Outlook for email at my shop. Over a year has

    My .PST file was at about 1.96GB

    From there, it wouldn't be long before incoming email and the
    ability to even delete emails would simply stop.

    The 2GB limit applies to ANSI formatted pst- and ost-files. Unless you
    are still using pst-files which were created in Outlook 2002/XP or
    previous, it is unlikely that your pst-file is still in the ANSI format.

    By default, a Unicode pst-file or ost-file can grow as large as 20GB in Outlook 2007 and 50GB in Outlook 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019 and Office 365.

    That's not to say a purge wasn't warranted or a good idea. Purging email
    is cathartic, and is important for performance. I typically seem to
    notice performance hits starting to rear their head in the ~15gb range,
    and they increase as size goes up. It's like pulling teeth to get
    clients to trim their inboxes though, and I have several in the 30gb+
    range because they feel the need to keep everything they've ever
    received since 2003 immediately accessible.

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ The Undermine - bbs.undermine.ca:423
  • From Ogg@VERT/CAPCITY2 to MRO on Fri Apr 9 21:35:00 2021
    Hello MRO!

    ** On Friday 09.04.21 - 17:33, MRO wrote to Ogg:

    I've seen email backup utils for backing up cloud-based email to
    local files. But my MS Outlook is lo

    My original message got sent before I remembered to finish it.
    :( But.. you figured out precisely what I was about to write.

    if you want it from the local source there's free utils to
    extract it to eml or whatever -+-

    I'm good now. From a few bits of info here, I was encouraged to
    revisit the .PST format options that Outlook provided. Turns
    out that my original .PST format was a retro version that only
    supported a file size of 2GB max. I simply created a new .PST
    file using the default file-type and then copied everything from
    the old .PST file to the newly formatted .PST

    The new .PST file format is supposted to support up to 20GB in
    my Outlook 2007. But given that I have less than 11.5GB
    diskspace free on my 222GB drive, I probably have a more
    pressing thing to worry about soon. :(

    --- OpenXP 5.0.49
    * Origin: Ogg's Dovenet Point (723:320/1.9)
    þ Synchronet þ CAPCITY2 * capcity2.synchro.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/Rlogin/HTTP
  • From Ogg@VERT/CAPCITY2 to Underminer on Fri Apr 9 21:45:00 2021
    Hello Underminer!

    ** On Friday 09.04.21 - 15:10, Underminer wrote to Ogg:

    Thanks for the info. I always felt that the 2GB limit
    seemed unreasonable for a premium product > I *think* I
    figured out how to produce a pseudo-archive of the current
    .pst file: copy the current .pst and rename it to the

    What I'd be inclined to do that would clean up most issues
    (assuming you're running a version of outlook more recent
    than 2003):

    My email account was originally configured by a previous owner
    at the shop that I now own and operate myself. I did not
    realize that there were even two choices for the .PST format
    type. My personal email account never ran into the 2GB limit
    for 4 years that I worked there as an employee.

    But as owner, I started getting all the promos and catalogs ..so
    that started to add up quickly.

    Create a new profile with new data files, then you know
    you're not running an old and intrinsically kneecapped
    format. Then you can either import from the old pst into the
    new one, or mount it in the profile and copy the messages/
    folders you want.

    That's about what I did. It all looks ok now.


    --- OpenXP 5.0.49
    * Origin: Ogg's Dovenet Point (723:320/1.9)
    þ Synchronet þ CAPCITY2 * capcity2.synchro.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/Rlogin/HTTP
  • From Underminer@VERT/UNDRMINE to Ogg on Sat Apr 10 03:57:51 2021
    But as owner, I started getting all the promos and catalogs ..so
    that started to add up quickly.

    U> Create a new profile with new data files, then you know
    U> you're not running an old and intrinsically kneecapped
    U> format. Then you can either import from the old pst into the
    U> new one, or mount it in the profile and copy the messages/
    U> folders you want.

    That's about what I did. It all looks ok now.

    Awesome. Glad it's worked out.

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ The Undermine - bbs.undermine.ca:423
  • From Ogg@VERT/CAPCITY2 to poindexter FORTRAN on Sat Apr 10 09:55:00 2021
    Hello pF!

    ** On Friday 09.04.21 - 07:38, you wrote to me:

    08/04/2021 09:39 AM 1,351,549,952 august.pst

    What version of Outlook are you using? I thought they blew
    past the 2gb limit with newer versions/PST formats?

    I wasn't aware of the diffs between the .PST types across the
    versions of OL. My email account was actually built by someone
    else at the time. I think we started with OL 2003 and moved to
    OL 2007 later on.

    Slipstick.com was a great site way back when for Outlook
    add-ons and information

    Thanks for that. It looks like a good resource.

    - one of the programs they had on there would automatically
    remove attachments and put them in a folder hierarchy with
    the sender's name as the folder name. When I was managing
    large PSTs and before people could share links to OneDrive
    or Google Drive it came in handy.

    I still see people leaving photo attachements in their original
    emails, and using the email program as their "album". One
    person was doing this with their Outlook Express email program!
    No matter how much I encourged that person to save the
    attachment as a file and store it in a photo directory, they
    would revert to leaving those things in their email. Eventually
    OE broke and they lost pretty much everything. I set them up
    with Thunderbird after I recovered as much from the old OE .db
    files as I could, but they returned to the old ways of leaving
    all attachments in the emails. Then they switched to MS Mail,
    (and they wanted me to "convert" everything for that).. but
    then, eventually MS Mail stopped support and stopped working
    too. We're back to TB but this time it's a MAPI set up, so that
    at least the stuff is saved/archived on their ISP server. And
    so the story goes..

    --- OpenXP 5.0.49
    * Origin: Ogg's Dovenet Point (723:320/1.9)
    þ Synchronet þ CAPCITY2 * capcity2.synchro.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/Rlogin/HTTP