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HOME TOPICS SEARCH ABOUT ME s deleted messages pile up, your mail software has to step around them, so to speak. |
technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 Purge deleted mail to speed up your softwareDec. 12, 2001 By Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2001, Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2001, The Post Standard Computers are strange. All that e-mail you get day after day takes up a lot of space on your hard drive. Yet deleting all that mail doesn't save any space. That's because you have to take an extra step to free up that space. Most computer users don't know about that second step, so I'll try to explain it in simple terms. What I'm going to tell you applies to most e-mail programs but not to all. If you're using Outlook Express or Eudora, for example, today's article applies to you. It also applies if you're using Outlook, the mail-and-everything-else program that many people confuse with Outlook Express. Here's the problem. To speed things up, mail software doesn't actually deal with separate messages. It seems to -- it shows them to you and lets you read them and do other things like that -- but they're just parts of a collection of messages, all stuck together. Messages are like chapters in a book. If you give a book to your brother-in-law, he might only read two or three chapters. He doesn't delete the others; he just ignores them. Likewise, your e-mail software just ignores the stuff you've deleted. It's no longer indexed, so the mail program can't show it to you no matter how much you want to see. it. (I'm not talking about mail you put into the trash. You can get that mail back out easily. I'm referring to mail that's been totally deleted. It's still there, taking up space, but it's nowhere to be found. It's not indexed any more, not chapterized, so to speak.) You never have to worry about this undeleted mail. You could keep deleting mail for years and not have much of a problem except for a general feeling that things are slowing down. As deleted messages pile up, your mail software has to step around them, so to speak, and this takes time. Luckily (or unluckily, I suppose), Windows users tend to have to reinstall their operating system and their software every now and then anyway, so they end up with freshly created mail folders without any deleted mail getting in the way. (Why Microsoft never hit on this angle as a marketing technique I don't know. Maybe it's because Microsoft doesn't have a sense of humor.) To fix the problem of mail bloat, all you have to do is "compact" (or compress) your mail folders. In Outlook Express, click the File menu, choose Folder, then "Compact All Folders." (You can compact only one folder, but that doesn't make much sense.) In Outlook, right click on the top-level folder (the one probably named after you, with "Outlook Today" in the name as well) and choose "Properties," then "Advanced." Choose "Compact Now." Other Windows e-mail programs usually have the same kind of options. Mac software does, also. And all the mail programs I've used under Linux worked this way, too. If you do a lot of mail, compact your folders once a week to speed things up. Otherwise, do it once a month. |