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Outlook is rather notoriously fragile, especially as the mail history
files grow large enough. (I just did a Google search on "Outlook large
file corruption" and there were *only* 2,140,000 hits. If it is true
that "misery loves company" you should be in great company!)
A good part of the problem is that Microsoft stuffs everything into
very large files. If one of these files gets corrupted, everything
inside can be lost.
Personally, I moved to gmail and forgot about the issue some time
back. Gmail will import mail from Outlook (and contacts, too)...and is
obviously available wherever you have an Internet connection.
I agree, though, that there are also many good email clients out there
which will also do very well--and Thunderbird is certainly one of
them.
Of course, if you cannot solve your file corruption problems and don't
have a backup, you may be partly or wholly SOL.
At one point, too, the Exchange servers had some rather serious
database limitations. I presume by now, though, that Microsoft may
have altered the database engine included to relieve that problem.
>From the fact that you speak of personal mail being archived, though,
I presume that this is not a corporate Exchange issue, but simply a
problem with the rather brain-dead Outlook client.
As far as I am aware, upgrading to a newer Outlook version will not
help the large file corruption issue...although newer versions are
supposed to handle larger maximum file sizes, they still can become
corrupt.
David
> From: Lauren <lauren -at- writeco -dot- net>
> To: jopakent <jopakent -at- comcast -dot- net>
> Date: Sat, 05 Sep 2009 14:19:32 -0700
> Subject: Re: Outlook hosed, pondering next step
> jopakent wrote:
>>
>> I've been accumulating history in my Outlook folders for several years now.
>> Sent mail, Project Folders, even deleted mail has all been gradually
>> expanding over time.
>>
>
>> "There was a problem in the messaging service, if this problem persists,
>> please restart Outlook."
>>
>> I've tried restarting both Outlook and the computer, but the symptom
>> persists.
>>
>
> It sounds like your mail file got too large. I had this issue and resolved it by archiving old mail items and compacting the archive folder. Outlook started having too many issues for me, like being slow because I store all of mail, so I switched to Thunderbird and I am very happy with this email client. I can import my Outlook messages into Thunderbird, but it is convenient enough to just access Outlook when I need to look through old mail.
>
> Lauren
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