What the hell is Outlook doing raping all my hard disk space?

UberTiger · 17 Jan 2011 at 22:51

So I've got about 6 gmail accounts in my Outlook 2010 that I just setup a few days ago. I've been going through each one, tidying them up and filing away old emails in folders.

According to gmail this one particular account is using 4,622MB of my 7,541MB available.

After I set it up in outlook and let it Sync the .pst for that account was over 10GB. Earlier today I went through it. Nearly all the email were in the inbox and I marked them all as read and moved them to a folder I created. I even deleted some of them! Now for the past however many hours I've had this icon that says MS Outlook is Synchronising folders and my SDD C: space is steadily depleting. The .pst for this account is up to 15GB and I only have about 3.5GB of space left on my SSD.

WTF is outlook doing? :confused:

Edit add: It's syncing by IMAP so surely it should be pretty much the same size as what google is reporting to me?

UberTiger · 18 Jan 2011 at 09:22

Thanks a lot for the reply Crash and co., that does make sense and I think you might be right about the 'All Mail', plus I forgot about the fact that you can have multiple labels on a single email which may lead to dupes in Outlook by having it in multiple folders.

It stopped syncing soon after 15GB (thank goodness!) but I'll spend some time today in the gmail interface and in Outlook checking what's labelled/filed and what's just archived, and also where my deleted items are going.

I'm going to fiddle with what folders Outlook is subscribing too and do some compacting to see what happens and report back later.

UberTiger · 18 Jan 2011 at 09:24

I was always under the impression that pop3 always downloaded everything from the server so if I wanted to access via webmail when on the road I couldn't access my old emails, as they would be saved on my desktop at home, which is why I've always endeavoured to use imap for the last couple of years. Am I mistaken on that?

UberTiger · 18 Jan 2011 at 09:33

Ahh okay, but if you then filed stuff away or deleted it in outlook that change wouldn't carry over to gmails server would it? So you'd have to do it again through the web interface at a later date if you wanted both to match?

UberTiger · 18 Jan 2011 at 12:55

Right, I removed the IMAP subscription to 'All Mail' on one of my accounts as a test and compacted the .pst and it close to halved it from about 500mb to about 250mb. Only took a few seconds to do so.

Did the same with the huge account and it's been compacting for the last 3 hours :eek:

The .pst file size is dropping very slowly, down by 2GB in size so far, hopefully it'll be finished when I get home from work tonight.