Computer(Outlook Express) Question

[Darian Rachal]

Every week or so, when I close OE I get a message(exclamation mark in triangle) that says "To freeup disk space, OE can compact messages. This may take up to a few minutes". During the process of compacting deleted messages it stops and a 'X' appears, with the message "the folder is currently in use in OE or by another application". I have to click on a box below the message for the process to continue.

I really do not think my messages need to be compacted that often because I really do not get a tremendous amount of e-mails. Any thoughts on how to prevent this messages from occurring. Any thoughts on the interruption of the procedure? Thanks for any assistance anyone is able to provide.

 

[sunward]

I recommend you compact messages on a regular basis.

Outlook has a bad habit of getting very big. Eventually, the indexing will fail and you will lose all the folders. You then have to rebuild the index manually.

 

[Darian Rachal]

Thanks Angelo. Any thoughts on why I get that 'folder in use' message?

 

[Meat]

thats one of the fun parts of Microsoft outlook. when you get that just cloe and reopen then run the compact again. Pretty much its a glitch
when you are compacting your folders though try and not do anything else on your computer usually good to go get a cup of coffee at that time. It is ussually a good idea to compact those regularly however corruption of the personal folders typically doesn't happen until you folder gets up around 1 gb,

 

[Darian Rachal]

Thanks for the info. The whole procedure seems to take about 7 or 8 minutes on my computer. I generally do nothing while it runs, until I get the folder in use message.

 

[Meat]

are you getting the message everytime it runs or just sometimes?

 

[sunward]

Thanks Angelo. Any thoughts on why I get that 'folder in use' message?

Back up your mail directory first. Check the size of your sent folder. Delete if needed. Then check the size of all folders in the mail directory. A big one may show a problem and you should compacting that folder only.

Try rebooting the computer. Then run compact all folders manually.

 

[Darian Rachal]

are you getting the message everytime it runs or just sometimes?

About 5 minutes into the process the message occurs each time. It seems it only started doing that several months ago.

 

[sunward]

About 5 minutes into the process the message occurs each time. It seems it only started doing that several months ago.

did a quick search.

Try:
https://www.lancelhoff.com/outlook-express-compacting-error/
https://office-outlook.com/outlook-forum/index.php/m/465396/#msg_465396
which gives links to microsoft group help

 

[Darian Rachal]

Thanks Angelo, appreciate the links.

 

[MarkII]

Switch to Thunderbird...

MarkII

 

[Trident]

Switch to Thunderbird...

MarkII

MarkII beat me too it! I could not get Outlook Express to work with Gmail, and Thunderbird worked perfectly. I've recently added 3 other POP email accounts to it, making it easy to manage personal and business emails from one place.

Cannot recommend it enough, but I am a big Mozilla fan. I've been using Firefox browser for years.

 

[Darian Rachal]

Thanks, Mark and Lee. I'll give your suggestion consideration.