Keeping MS Outlook happy
Dear friends and clients,
Most of us use
Microsoft Outlook on a daily basis – Not only
for our e-mail, but also as our calendar, contact list and task list. When you
think about it, we rely on this one package pretty heavily. And if it had to go
wrong, which can easily happen, what would we do without it?
The fact is
that Outlook, like everything else about your computer, needs regular
maintenance – This newsletter will show you how to do that.
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Location – All of Outlook’s information – mail, calendar, to-do list, etc. is stored in one file, which has the suffix .pst. This critical file is buried several layers deep by Microsoft, and as a result is difficult to find, let alone work with directly, or back up. One of the first things you should do is move your Outlook .pst file to a location that is backed up on a regular basis.
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Organise – While Outlook comes with a default set of folders, you are not limited to these. Organising your mail into specific subfolders makes it easier to find and easier to manipulate. Create subfolders under your Inbox (or even your Sent Items) to make your life easier. Make folders for items that you want to keep – and delete items that you don’t need, permanently. Don’t use your ‘Deleted Items’ folder as a storage facility – It can easily be emptied inadvertently.
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Rules – Outlook also has the ability to sort your incoming or outgoing mail directly into these folders for you – Rules are a powerful way to manipulate your mail – for instance you can automatically move all mail from a specific client into the folder that you created for ‘Client mail.’
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Archive – Because all your information is stored in this one file, it can get pretty large over time. This slows Outlook down, because it has to work with this large file every time you open it. A lot of this size is taken up with old e-mail, deleted e-mail (see ‘Organise’ above) and mail attachments that you may never need to see again. Outlook contains a facility to automatically archive this old mail, thereby removing it from your main .pst file. This archived information can be easily accessed if necessary, but it is not loaded every time you use Outlook.
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Back up – Losing your Outlook information can be disastrous – many people rely on the historical mail and calendar as a kind of record-keeping system. For this reason it is important to make a daily backup of your Outlook file – first prize is to back up to an off-site location, but at any rate to a separate device.
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Maintain – Outlook comes with several tools that can help to maintain your .pst file in good condition. A regular scanning with the scanpst utility can detect and repair database errors. Make a copy of the file first, and then rename it back to the original name afterwards. Outlook also includes the ability to compact the database file, and this should be done on a regular basis.
