How do I get rid of this annoying popup: “Outlook Express - To free up space, Outlook Express can compact messages. This may take a few minutes.”?

What is Compacting?

Before going over how to make the annoying popup disappear, let’s first look at what Outlook Express is asking you to do. The popup is prompting you to “compact” the messages that you have stored on your computer. This is a maintenance chore that should be done periodically to improve Outlook Express’s performance. While in this case the compacting procedure is applied to email messages, the term compacting is often used with databases. In both cases, compacting cleans up a master index that keeps track of the location of records, in this case, email messages.

For example, whenever you delete a message, it goes to the Deleted Items folder. When you empty the Deleted Items folder, the email disappears altogether. However, the message is not really gone (yet). Rather changes have been made to Outlook Express’s index instructing the software not to display the selected file. Compacting is a process where the deleted emails are finally removed, the index is rebuilt, and related entries removed.

Benefits of Compacting Messages

Periodically compacting messages doesn’t affect your current messages, so you don’t need to worry about losing emails. It simply finalizes older deletions and cleans up the leftovers. By compacting messages, you may also notice benefits such as faster loading of Outlook Express, faster email loading, faster previews, and so on.

How to Make the Compacting Messages Popup Go Away

You are likely receiving the popup right now because Outlook Express has reached a predetermined point where it is set to prompt you to compact messages. This setting is variable and is based on the number of times Outlook Express is opened and closed. To make the message go away for the short term, either click Cancel (or No depending on your version) or allow Outlook Express to compact your messages. If you allow the compacting to take place, do not interrupt the process. It may take a few minutes to complete.

To change how often you are prompted to compact messages, go to Tools > Options > Advanced and click on the Maintenance section. Find “Compact the database on shutdown every ___ runs” and enter the number of times you want to open and close Outlook Express between compacting sessions.

Celeste Stewart | January 28th, 2010
Tags: compact message, compacting email, Compacting Outlook Express Messages
Categories: Email

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