I have been using Microsoft Outlook as my email client since 1997. I started off using Outlook 97 which really was a dog. At the time I used Outlook Express like a lot of people did since it came free with Win95.

Soon after that I downloaded Outlook 98 which was much much better than Outlook 97, since then I have used every version as it was released. Recently I was a beta tester for Outlook 2007, just as an aside, I liked Office 2007 quite a bit, but at this time I just see no reason to upgrade from Office 2003 to Office 2007.

This particular Outlook version I am using has email as far back as June 6, 2002. As a result of this the Outlook data file (.pst file) takes up over 2 gig of space on the hard drive. This is absurd, I need to delete things!

To see how much space your Outlook .pst file is taking up do the following:

Go to TOOLS --> Mailbox Cleanup, you should see something like this:

Then click on View Mailbox Size, as you can see my .pst file is taking up over 2 gig worth of space.

After deleting the largest files in the Sent Folder, I see this:

Yep, the size went down by almost 400 meg, but the Total Size did not, that is because when I deleted the items out of the Sent Folder they were just moved to the Deleted Folder. So I will need to now go into the Deleted Folder and delete the items from it.

Now that we cleared out some of the emails in the Deleted Folder it looks like we have freed up a lot of space on the hard drive, or have we?

Looking at the actual .pst file using Explorer I see that it is taking up over 2 gig of space. To really finish the job you will need to compact the .pst file. Why Outlook does not do this on it's own is something I have never figured out. All I know is that it is annoying!

Click File --> Data File Management:

Then click on the file you want to compact, most of the time you will only have one to choose from, then click Settings.

Then click Compact Now, you will be reward with this box:

Be patient, it can take quite a while to compact the file depending on how fast your PC is and how fragmented the file was.

Looks like I shaved off over 400 meg by doing this.