Size of .PST file is not reducing even after emails items are permanently deleted

As an Outlook user, you may have noticed that the size of Outlook .PST file does not reduce even after permanently deleting email items.

When you delete email items from your mailbox, they get deleted from the .PST file and the space utilized by the deleted email items is marked as free. Outlook reserves the free space for new email items due to which the size of .PST file is not reduced. You can remove the reserved free space by compacting the .PST file to reduce the size of .PST file and to increase space on hard disk. Mentioned below are the steps that help you to compact a .PST file:

1. Start MS Outlook.

2. Select the Data File Management option in the File menu.

3. Select the Personal Folder (.pst) file that you need to compact. Following are the location on different version of Windows operating systems where you can locate .PST file:

• Windows Vista: Drive:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook

• Windows XP: Drive:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook

• Windows Server 2003: Drive:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook

1. Click the Settings button.

2. Click the Compact Now button. The PST recovery software starts compacting the specified .PST file.

3. After the software finishes compacting the specified .PST file, click the Close button.

This way you can free space from .PST file to increase space on your hard disk. However, Outlook can only compact the .PST files having size greater than or equal to 16 KB. In addition, Outlook does not completely remove free space during the compacting process. It leaves 16 KB or 4% of the file size, which is consumed when new email items are stored in .PST file.

Increasing size of PST file might lead to corruption in PST file. Using Kernel for PST Recovery tool, corruption issue is resolved.

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