Hi,
I've had quite a few systems exhibit these symptoms. It appears that Outlook Express under Win98SE simply runs out of puff when you've got a lot of e-mails.
It does funny things like lock up, refuse to delete, crash, make common tasks unavailable, etc...
I've read all the M$ trouble shooting info, I've patched all the programs... but it still keeps on doing it!
You may get some relief by breaking down your inbox, sent items, etc... into smaller folders. Breaking them down by year seems to work quite well eg. 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, etc...
Alternatively try to archive the older ones... so that Outlook Express deals with less e-mails.
I believe the problem occurs when you end up with more than 2GB worth of files or many thousands of e-mails. Some people archive e-mails because they realise that they may need them for legal reasons or perhaps they value them as a business resource and some are just prolific e-mailer's!
Win98 has a 2GB file size limit... that is probably causing the problem. I suspect that Win98 might also have trouble handling large databases (that's what Outlook Express basically is). For some reason neither Microsoft nor anyone else seems to have documented the Outlook problem on the net very well. Maybe MS is embarassed? Most heavy users moved right on to WinXP and probably never experienced the problem. Either way few people have written about the problem.
In the end my final solution was to move to WinXP... and almost all the problems disappeared. I still had a few problems (minor by comparison) because of the large volumes. M$ databases are not particularly robust either so I moved to an alternative e-mail client called "The BAT".
The BAT has now been working fine for quite a few years. I find it much easier to back up and restore with The BAT as well!
However I also moved a number of my friends with the same problem to WinXP (still using Outlook Express)... and they have reported no further problems.
The odd duplicate e-mail seems to be the only problem that recurs... even in The BAT.
Thus simply moving to WinXP is probably all it will take to fix your problem.
Alternatively archive your old e-mails.
Backing up e-mails just in case also makes a lot of sense.
...and if you want to access the whole lot without archiving anything... try "The BAT"... although even this starts to groan eventually. It got much better once I started organising sent and received files by year... which automatically reduced the maximum size of any folder.
You can try The BAT free for 30 days... plus it will import all Outlook Express e-mails as well... so you can test it before making the switch.
Nb. Faster computers with more memory also handle these larger files a bit faster. Sometimes slower computers simply look like they've stopped when in fact they are simply digesting the huge workload you've just dropped on them.
Hope some of that helps.
:-)
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Originally Posted by nicole
I have over 100,000 emails, but I want to keep them.
Can this be a problem?
At the moment I have lost the ability to use the FIND function in the main identity, but when I switch to another identity, it works.
Can anyone explain?
Many thanks!
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