Looking for an email program that can handle HUGE amounts of mail

[Galdorf]

I have a customer that has outlook he has over 5 gigs of email seems outlook is having problems and corrupts frequently i have checked his hard drive on bench for days seems outlook has problem with over 3 gigs of email.

[Blues]

Which version of outlook is the client using? We run MS Exchange and use MS Outlook 2k and have users with 2-9 GB mailbox store. I know they shouldn't but you try telling an executive vice president he doesn't really need all those emails and see if he listens. I don't know if being MS Exchange makes that big a difference or not. I would say that Outlook 2003 and laters should handle it much better as well increasing the systems RAM.

[PatrickB]

+1 on more RAM if the computer is short.

Check Outlook for Add-ins. Some of them may not play well and cause Outlook to crash.

Also, splitting the storage into multiple Outlook PST files should help as well. Once a PST file is opened, it will continue to open the next time Outlook is started, so you end up with more than one open in the tree on the left. Older email can archived. Email of certain topics or from certain senders could also be moved to separate PST files. The archiving function and the rules function can handle this process automatically.

In case you need it, you can hold down the Ctrl key while clicking the Outlook shortcut to open it. This will bring it up in Safe Mode without any add-ins.

-- Patrick B.

[cmerepair]

IMO 5gb is just to large to keep in your mail box. Sure, you can do it but sooner or later you will have some sort of corruption issues. The best way to handle this is with multiple archives so that you keep them in a managable size.

[ComputerRepairStpete]

Outlook 2003 and later use a PST file format capable of storing Unicode (a standard that can represent most alphabets on computers) data that has no theoretical size limit but a practical limit of 20 GB. so I think you might need to change the version of outlook your client is using.

[PatrickB]

If corruption of data files is an issue, consider disabling "Disk Write Caching" in the properties of the Hard Drive under Device Manager. The 3 lines of text next to that option say that it improves performance, but may allow corruption. In practice, I have not noticed any change in performance since the days of Windows 98.

-- Patrick B.

[Tweak]

Can you not archive some of the mail no longer directly needed and store it so that it is not a factor?

[PatrickB]

How would you use a website Content Management System to send and receive POP3 or IMAP email?

-- Patrick B.