Microsoft Outook – Improve Outlook's performance

Microsoft Outlook files can grow very large. The standalone Outlook client PST file can be as big as 2GB. As your data file approaches that limit Outlook may begin to misbehave. The closer you get to the 2GB limit the more you run the risk of losing all your data due to a corrupted PST file. Attachments more than anything else add to the size of the file. Each attachment to your emails in your inbox and sent folders increases the size of the PST file. These attachments may be Word documents, Excel Spreadsheets, PDFs, photos, audio or video files, or something else.

Typically there are four ways to deal with this issue. We can delete the emails and the attachment in order to save space. We can export the email with attachments and then delete it from Outlook. We can archive old emails. Finally, we can save the attachments and then remove them from the email. These solutions are unsatisfactory. We lose having the information stored in one place and easily searchable.

The free Outlook Attachment Remover Add-in solves this problem quite elegantly. Once installed it lets you run the add-in, save your attachments to your computer's hard drive, remove the attachment(s) from the email and replace them with a hyperlinks to the locations on your hard drive. When the process is done you can compact your PST file and make Outlook more stable and faster. If you need to find the attachment, all you need do is locate the email and click on the link.

This works with Outlook versions 2000, 2002 (AKA XP), 2003, and 2007.

I ran this on my Outlook file on a Vista computer and reduced its size from about 600 MB to 400 MB, a one-third reduction in the size of the PST file. It took only a few minutes to run and the result is quite satisfactory.