A lot of mail. No, really, a lot | Bangkok Post: tech

SLOAN RANGER

A regular Bangkok Post reader, Patrick, has an email problem. Well don't we all, eh? But Patrick's is one I haven't heard for a while. He writes:

Like the Firefox browser, the free Thunderbird email program has many specialist add-ons and extensions that give you even more power over your mail.

"I have quite a heavy email traffic of a few hundred mails per day. Recently when travelling and unable to download my mail for a couple of days, when finally downloading close to 1,000 mails Outlook would shut down, either without warning or just by giving a failure message after a few hundred mails.

"Starting Outlook in safe mode has helped but not all the time. Also, the magic number of 2GB for the .pst file has become a major issue as I need to virtually archive and close an archive monthly. Is there any viable alternative to Outlook that can better handle a large volume?"

Patrick, thank you so much for reading Life, and the answer is yes, yes there are actually several alternatives. But one of them is pretty simple: a new Outlook.

Simply put, Patrick, you have fallen behind the upgrade curve. No one likes this curve, but it's something we all have to attend to exactly because of issues like the one you raise.

Outlook 2002 (and earlier versions) have a 2GB limit for a mail folder, both for the personal folders (.pst) and offline folders (.ost) file types. It's even worse than you detail for us, because once the mail folder reaches that magic 2GB limit, the file will not be useable even if you delete items.

The reason for the limit was understandable back in the last century. It's a technical item, having to do with the limitations of Windows on a hard drive.

You can get around this 2-gig limit with your current setup. Create multiple personal folders and then, instead of having just one confusing and fast-growing .pst folder, you can actually organise your email a bit, dumping this type of mail here, that type there. (You should probably have a work and a home folder anyhow.)

But the good news is it's 2011 and you don't have to do this _ if you just upgrade your Outlook or move to another application or system. There are several choices.

First and probably easiest is to upgrade Outlook _ probably the entire Microsoft Office _ to 2003 or later, preferably later. From the 2003 version onward, Outlook had no 2GB limit on folder sizes. There is still a limit, though _ 20GB. I strongly recommend you keep your .pst and .ost folder sizes below 18GB. That is an awful lot of mail.

Another choice: The free and really well-liked Mozilla Thunderbird. It's free, it will convert your Outlook mail folders to its own format.

I haven't put my hands on the Thunderbird Ver 5 yet, but this new upgrade is getting excellent reviews about its stability and dependability.

And a third choice would be to go webmail and do mail primarily through your browser. Google Mail (I believe it is best), Hotmail and the newly improved Yahoo Mail all store and search messages fantastically well. In the event your account fills up, get another one, and link them. (Gmail for example allows you to be logged into three separate at the same time.)

Long-time reader Taka thinks his problem might be one which has bothered other Windows 7 users.

"I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate on a Lenovo laptop (core i5, 4GB RAM). Quite regularly, when moving a file, the computer will semi-crash. That is, the desktop is still displayed, the move-file-window displays 'calculating', but the machines freezes and it is necessary to reboot. A zero-byte file shows the destination folder, with the original still in place. I can now move the file in two steps: copy/paste and then delete the original.

"On the other hand, using a program such as CopyHandler lets me move the files without any problems."

Well, this sort of problem is almost always brought on by hardware. There are many reports of such file-management problems that freeze Windows machines, all recent species of Windows, and inevitably, the fix is in the hardware. I have looked at a few of these myself, and a lot of reports, and never heard of one where Windows itself was the basic culprit and could be fixed or repaired. That is not to excuse Windows, but historically, only hardware fixes work.

But saying that the problem is probably hardware is not the same as easily finding and fixing it. Reading through some of the reports of fixes to a copy-freeze, I was struck by how many different causes and fixes there are.

The one thing you don't report is where from and to, you are moving the file. If you are moving from one folder to another on the same drive, the file actually goes nowhere; Windows merely fixes up the report of the file in the disk's detailed database. But if you move from one drive to another, the file must first be copied (just as you do manually), and then deleted from its original place. Among possible problems here: not enough disk space to make a full copy including buffer, or a cluttered Temp folder with too many files. Memory is often a problem but the memory on your laptop is more than enough to handle any Windows copy or move situation.

Many of the problems I have seen involved the power of the machine involved.

Windows 7 takes horsepower, and a lot of people solved the copy-freeze by getting a bigger power supply. A few upgraded their BIOS, because their PC was a bit old and the manufacturer had fixed some power bugs.

Sorry to say that in summary, this kind of Windows problem is maddening because there is not a single cause or solution.

Email: wandasloan@gmail.com