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At the company where I work, the owners use POP/SMTP in Outlook to be able to keep an active multi-year history of emailed conversations. This history cannot be archived by date so they have been creating subfolders in their inboxes and filing the incoming mail into the folder corresponding to the sender's company.
They say they must have ALL this mail immediately at hand and easily findable no matter how old it is. This can mean 6 or 7 years of email. They constantly have corruptions in their PST and will not remember to run "scanpst" or any other re-organizing tools.
In an effort to solve the problem, I tried creating a second PST called "History" and letting them file their client subfolders in it by using "Move". This resulted in a 1-2 GB Outlook.PST and a huge History.PST which is never used for anything but storage.
It works so well I am afraid it is too good to be true and wondered if anyone else had ever tried this. Their Outlook now boots in a fraction of the time it did take and they no longer have corrupted PST's since the main Outlook.PST is never that large. The History.PST continues to grow (now over 12 GB), but does not appear to cause any problems or slow down Outlook in any way.
I figured if anyone anywhere else had ever done this, they could surely be found here. I offered the normal "archiving" option but was told they don't file by "date' and there is no given criteria I could use for automatically doing this.
If anyone can offer any suggestions or warnings about doing it this way, I would appreciate it.
There is a physical size limit to .PST I would worry about that. Outlook can support multiple .PST files without an issue. – Ramhound – 2013-04-23T15:33:30.993
I also suggest in the email archiving specific products that are regularly backed up. It sounds like if a single hdd crashed this 12GB file would be an devestating lost. – Ramhound – 2013-04-23T15:42:02.220
My own History.PST grew up to some 20 GB before I spawned off the contents elder than three years into a separate PST. I noticed that the old PST format prior to Outlook 2003 used to be less reliable than the current one. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Storage_Table Obviously, periodic backups of the PST files are definitely recommended!
– Axel Kemper – 2013-04-23T16:47:00.987