Why Compacting Is Necessary In Outlook Express?

When you exit Outlook Express, a message appears on your screen and prompts:

To free up disk space, Outlook Express can compact messages. This may take up to a few minutes.

The message is unclear and makes it alarming. You must be thinking whats going on? Does Outlook Express want to delete your previous emails? Or this is another virus attack on your emails. Although you can Repair Outlook Express, but its important to know what this message is all about.

You can click OK and wait for the compacting process to finish. It is important to note here that the process of compacting folders must not be interrupted. When the compacting process is allowed to complete, the process will ascertain that your Outlook Express runs smoothly and disk space does not gets waste in excessive manner.

If you are feeling what is compacting and why is it necessary, then read further. When you delete an email in Outlook Express, it is moved to Deleted Items folder making it disappears from its original folder and when you empty the Trash, it disappears from there too. In none of the two cases, the message is removed from the file on your disk immediately. However, you might have to wait or experience Outlook Express working slowly whenever you delete a couple of emails. This is the reason why deletion merely hides the messages from view.

Having all the deleted messages still on the disk obviously means there is a lot of space that can be reclaimed and if Outlook Express has to keep track of too many obsolete messages then it itself means Outlook Express will respond slowly. Hence, it tries to remove these deleted emails physically at regular intervals and this process is termed compacting. Therefore, every 100 times you close Outlook Express, it prompts you to start the process.

Compacting folders from time to time is important and the most important thing is that the process must be completed without interruption. If Outlook Express did the compacting in background then you will experience a slowdown, sense of crash or something to quit Outlook Express. During Compaction, Outlook Express will refuse to exit and so due to frustration, you might kill the process making your email messages corrupt and inaccessible. Therefore, compaction process is devised to take place manually.

After deleting an array of messages and emptying the Deleted Items folder, you can perform compaction of your .DBX files manually to reclaim the disk space. To do so go to File > Folder > Compact All Folders from the menu and the compaction will start.

Make sure that compacting the email folders manually will not reset Outlook Expresss launch cost. If you compress your folders manually before closing Outlook Express for the 100th time, it will still prompt you to pursue its periodic cleanup. However, if in case the DBX file gets corrupt, you can Repair Outlook Express using Kernel Recovery for Outlook Express.

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