Special Edition Using® Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2003

Compacting Personal Folders

When you delete items from folders in a Personal Folders file or an Offline Folders file (including cached Exchange mode), Outlook doesn't automatically reclaim all the space once occupied by those items. To reclaim the space previously occupied by those items, you must compact your Personal Folders file.

Outlook users working in cached Exchange mode can get a good idea of just how much space is available to be reclaimed by using the Folder Size button on a cached Exchange store. Figure 24.7 shows the local folder size for my message store. Figure 24.8 shows the server folder size for the same folders. As you can see, the server folders are significantly smaller than the local folders.

Figure 24.7. Cached Exchange ...