Deleting Emails in Outlook Express

[JohnE]

This morning I was down to about 1Gb of disk space remaining on my 38GB hard drive - so I decided that it was time to get rid of some old emails. I often send people very large files by email, so I knew they'd be taking up a large amount of space.

I managed to locate all the emails I wanted to delete. Slowly but surely I've been dragging them into the 'Deleted Items' folder in Outlook Express.

But here's the bad news.... I right-click on the 'Deleted Items' folder and I click the option to empty it. The usual message appears (Are you sure you want to permanently deete the contens of the 'Deleted Items' folder?). I click 'YES'.... but my available disk space then goes DOWN instead of up. After deleting 1,000 or so emails, I'm now reduced to only 190Mb of disk space. The emails appear to have gone (i.e. they don't show up anywhere within Outlook Express - nor are they sitting in my Recycle Bin). So why don't I get the disk space back???

My 'Sent Items' folder (i.e. the one I was deleting everything from) is still exactly the same size as it was before I started. But in addition, I now seem to have a big file on my drive called 'Deleted Items.dbx' It's 780Mb - and yet the 'Deleted Items' folder is completely empty. Does this make sense to anyone??

Do I need to compact the folders somehow?

[ninikins]

I wish I'd could help'but I've not heard of this. When I delete mails from my outlook it seems to increase diskspace. don't know what to suggest but sounds very odd to me.

[felice206]

Hopefully someone will answer this, I've never had the problem either, but I could see something like that happening at some point in the future

[JohnE]

Some further info....

I've realised that Norton Utilities is at least partly involved in this. Let's say I delete a big file (900Mb). Initially, Norton put it into a 'protected' area so that it can be recovered later if it was deleted accidentally. This means that the disk size stays the same as it was before, which is fair enough. When I empty my Norton protected files, I get the disk space back.

However, this doesn't seem to hold true for Emails. Let's say I drag 900Mb of Emails from my Inbox into the Deleted Items folder. 'Deleted Items.dbx' increases in size by 900Mb - but 'Inbox.dbx' stays the same size as it was before. Therefore I lose 900Mb of disk space. Emptying the Deleted Items folder at this stage transfers everything to Norton somehow - but it doesn't reduce the size of 'Deleted Items.cbx' Therefore I lose a further 900Mb. I can recover 900Mb now by emptying my Norton protected files. But the problem is that I lost, in total, 1.8Gb - so I'm still 900Mb down!!

Bear in mind that, at this point, my Norton protected folder is empty and the 2 files called 'Inbox.dbx' and 'Deleted Items.dbx' haven't decreased in size. Under Outlook Express's 'File' menu there's an option to compact these folders. If I do compact them, the size of those 2 files reduces dramatically, but - and this is the annoying bit - my available disk space decreases. You might think that the data has all been transferred to Norton but it hasn't. If I right-click on my Recycle Bin, both the Unerase Wizard and the Norton protected files are showing as empty. All that data's been transferred somewhere but I've got no idea where it went!!!

[JohnE]

This morning I've managed to get about 200Mb back by simply removing old System Restore points. However, the net result, after deleting about 1000 Emails and emptying my Recycle Bin and purging my Norton protected files, is that I now have 600Mb less space than I had in the first place!!!

[Tyler]

Well I'm not sure why that is happening, however I know you can just delete 'Deleted Items.dbx' if you want. Just to be sure though I suggest renaming it to 'Deleted Items.backup' or something just to be sure and see if Outlook creates a new one and everything is still working fine.

[JohnE]

Thanks Tyler - looking back now, I realise that I should have just deleted my 'Deleted Items.dbx' when it was 780Mb. Instead, I compacted it - which brought it down to a reasonable size (less than 200Kb) but it didn't release any disk space (in fact somehow, compacting the folder took up more of my disk space) and I've no idea at all where all those unwanted entries went.... In future, I'll just delete the file 'Deleted Items.dbx' like you suggested.

[zlatan24]

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[zlatan24]

Originally Posted by JohnE

This morning I was down to about 1Gb of disk space remaining on my 38GB hard drive - so I decided that it was time to get rid of some old emails. I often send people very large files by email, so I knew they'd be taking up a large amount of space.

I managed to locate all the emails I wanted to delete. Slowly but surely I've been dragging them into the 'Deleted Items' folder in Outlook Express.

But here's the bad news.... I right-click on the 'Deleted Items' folder and I click the option to empty it. The usual message appears (Are you sure you want to permanently deete the contens of the 'Deleted Items' folder?). I click 'YES'.... but my available disk space then goes DOWN instead of up. After deleting 1,000 or so emails, I'm now reduced to only 190Mb of disk space. The emails appear to have gone (i.e. they don't show up anywhere within Outlook Express - nor are they sitting in my Recycle Bin). So why don't I get the disk space back???

My 'Sent Items' folder (i.e. the one I was deleting everything from) is still exactly the same size as it was before I started. But in addition, I now seem to have a big file on my drive called 'Deleted Items.dbx' It's 780Mb - and yet the 'Deleted Items' folder is completely empty. Does this make sense to anyone??

Do I need to compact the folders somehow?

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[zlatan24]

Originally Posted by Tyler

Well I'm not sure why that is happening, however I know you can just delete 'Deleted Items.dbx' if you want. Just to be sure though I suggest renaming it to 'Deleted Items.backup' or something just to be sure and see if Outlook creates a new one and everything is still working fine.

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