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

UberTiger

UberTiger

UberTiger

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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?
 
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It's a bit hard to say exactly what's happened without knowing what you moved to where, and how you did it (in Outlook or the Gmail web interface), but using the two together can get very messy if you're not careful. I don't have Outlook 2010, which I gather is better than 2007 at playing nicely with Gmail, but even so I'd imagine the potential for confusion is still there, simply by virtue of the fact that they handle storage/retrieval using different approaches - one email can have many labels in Gmail, but it can only sit in one folder at a time in Outlook (which means Outlook will create duplicates of emails which have more than one label).

Before you do anything, check that "All Mail" is *not* listed as an IMAP subscribed folder in Outlook, or you'll definitely end up with at least two copies of everything that has at least one label in Gmail (ie is in at least one folder in Outlook, not counting "All Mail").

Then to begin clearing up, if I were you I'd use the Gmail interface, go into "All Mail" and make sure that each email you want to sync with Outlook has only *one* label. Then fire up Outlook, let it sync (mapping labels to folders), and then compact the PST file (it won't shrink by itself when emails are moved/deleted).

Also, make sure that any future deletions using Outlook are *moved to the Gmail bin* - IIRC Outlook 2010 has an option to set this to happen by default when you hit Delete, but in 2007 you have to physically drag and drop them - if you don't do this, it simply removes any labels, leaving them archived in All Mail, which might not be what you want.

Re-reading the above it all looks as clear as mud, but hopefully my horrible explanation will give you at least some idea of what might be going on and how to deal with it, assuming your problem isn't due to something else entirely. :)
 
I had a load of issues with IMAP, Gmail and Outlook 2007 and eventually stopped using IMAP. As Gmail keeps a copy of all your e-mails I just used pop3, downloaded the lot and then deleted the ones I didn't want to keep in Outlook.

IMAP doesn't seem to work very well when you have a huge amount of e-mails, at least in my experience.

It is possible when you moved the e-mails that IMAP just replaced them.
 
IMAP is the issue here

Gmail may be reporting less disc usage, but they must use compression on all mailboxes.

Change to pop3
 
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.
 
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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?
 
pretty sure in the pop3 settings -within the gmail interface, you can set it to only download new mail.

There's a setting that will mark your webmail items as read if you've read them in outlook
 
UberTiger said:
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?
Click to expand...

There is a setting in gmail that tells it to leave a copy in the inbox after being accessed via POP3.
 
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?
 
You can set items that have been read in Outlook to go into the 'all mail' and be 'marked as read'

-So if you want to sort any items out later, you can do them through the gmail interface.

Personally, I just use the web interface all the time, I prefer it
 
bledd. said:
IMAP is the issue here

Gmail may be reporting less disc usage, but they must use compression on all mailboxes.

Change to pop3
Click to expand...
I don't think so, or at least not IMAP alone - IMAP works very well when used with a "conventional" client/server setup, it's just getting a Gmail account to behave consistently and predictably when using an IMAP client that's the problem.

It can be done, you just need to be aware of the fundamentally different way they do things and adjust your Outlook habits accordingly - for instance, in Outlook 2007 if you "move" an email from the inbox to a different folder (ie a Gmail label), it will place a copy there and strikethrough the original in the inbox, which will remain until it's purged. Then when you *do* purge it, you're simply removing all the labels, so it actually remains in "All Mail", although Outlook believes it's been permanently deleted. As I said, Outlook 2010 may have improved this behaviour but I don't have a copy handy so I can't be certain.

And then there's the "Sent" folder - in the Gmail web interface, the "Sent" label is persistent, so if you drag and drop an email from "Sent" to another label, it also remains in "Sent", whereas if you do the same in an IMAP client the "Sent" label will probably be removed. All very confusing and inconsistent.

I think if you're set on using Outlook with Gmail you should probably avoid using the webmail interface to keep things as simple as possible, although this does detract somewhat from its overall usefulness IMO. I eventually got fed up with the ongoing issues and now I just stick the web interface, using labels as they were intended to be used, and knowing that I'll have entirely consistent behaviour wherever I access my mail from, without having to worry about the idiosyncracies of particular IMAP clients. I do however use Thunderbird to sync/backup all my Gmail accounts regularly, just in case something nasty and beyond my control happens at Google's end. :)
 
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.
 
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