PSTCompress

If you're like me and a heavy user of Microsoft Outlook, you sometimes get frustrated over how long it takes Outlook to do something: load at startup, find a message, sort your list, ... You would think after all these years, they could get the product to work smoothly and quickly. Even worse, in 2003 (the version that I am currently using), there's a 2Gigabyte limit to the size of any Outlook data file (they're called PST or PoST office files), beyond which you can encounter corruption and loss of data. [Editors Note: And I'm certainly not moving to Outlook 2007 anytime soon -- my clients have had horrible experiences with that and with Vista as well -- I recommend you stick with Outlook 2003 and Windows XP. I'm currently evaluation Mozilla's Thunderbird as a possible replacement for Outlook...]

I was approaching that 2Gig limit and things were running very slowly, so I cast around for a way to compress the files. I quickly came across PSTCompress, a utility which could do this automatically and on schedule for a number of different Outlook PST files. It was the only such utility that I could find, so I figured I'd give it a whirl: they have a trial version which can work on a single PST file.

What I found very interesting is that they also have options to compress any attachments (converting them to zip file during the compression) and/or extracting them to external files stored under the Outlook folder where the PST file was stored. I chose the latter option and reduced a 1.8Gig PST file to about 200K -- and now Outlook really soared! I was very pleased initially but when I did my first search on my hard drive, my satisfaction quickly soured.

What I learned was that each attachment is individually exported to a unique subdirectory for each email that contained an attachment! So I wound up with over 4500 new subdirectories, each with maybe 1-3 files in the subdirectory.

The net result was that searches took forever as they had to grind through thousands of subdirectories with such a small number of files in each one.

What resulted in so many directories was partly the fact that any little image (such as a GIF file created to include a logo in a signature box) also resulted in a new subdirectory and the 50-byte file included.

This is an example of mindless automation: extracting such small files just adds to the overhead and reduces the overall value of the compression.

I've spent quite a bit of time recovering from this fiasco. Unfortunately, by the time I realized that I was living a nightmare, too much time had passed and I couldn't figure out how to go back to my saved PST file prior to the compress. Moving the message from one PST file to another doesn't change the location of the file on the Hard Drive, so I can't get them back into the PST file, which means I can't summarily delete all the thousands of directories that were created: for now, I search around the location unless I absolutely have to, which is an ongoing inconvenience.

I have started writing a series of scripts to remove the unwanted stuff (all those tiny little logo GIFs) and then remove empty directories, but I wish I had never tried the product out.

Interestingly enough, I was discussing with the sales rep from the company about purchasing a license to use it regularly, but when I started asking questions about the file structure/design and how to recover, he stopped answering my emails and I haven't heard from him since!

DON'T GET BURNED LIKE I DID -- THIS PRODUCT IS BIG TROUBLE!!

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