Compact PST to reduce the chances of corruption

As a regular Outlook user, you are greatly aware of the vulnerability of PST files to data corruption. Moreover, it is not a new matter for you to face PST corruption errors so often. One of the common PST errors is given below:

“Task 'Microsoft Exchange Server - Receiving' reported error (0x8004060C): 'Unknown Error 0x8004060C'”

When you send or receive messages in Outlook, the file that contains mails refuses to store additional items.

Root Cause of the Error

The error occurs when personal folders file or PST reaches its size limit, i.e. 2 GB.

PST size is one of the top causes out of numerous reasons of PST file corruption. It is essential to know that in Outlook 2002 and earlier versions, there is 2 GB file-size limit for PST files and once the data larger than this limit is placed in the file, it gets corrupt. When you receive or send an email, add a new contact, etc., all the data is stored in PST. When the file reaches the maximum size limit, it refuses to store more items and the above error is raised. This is undoubtedly a serious issue that leads to data loss.

You know it well that your mailbox consists of many such mails that are no more of use or there may be many duplicate emails in different folders. Therefore, it is the best practice to keep the mailbox as clean as possible. If there are no useless items in mailbox, PST would not reach its size limit so early. Well, when you delete items from Outlook folders, they are moved to the 'Deleted Items' folder. In turn, if you empty this folder too, you can now rest assured that PST will not get corrupt. This is not true in real-time scenario. Wondering?

Yes, when you delete items permanently, space occupied by these items in PST is still not deleted. This is a clear indication that the space cannot be reused and the size of the file is still not reduced. In this case, an intelligent approach is to 'compact PST'. By compacting the PST file, you can simply reduce the size of the file that was earlier dramatically large due to the presence of deleted items. The method does not remove all the free space though, yet is a good practice to eliminate the limitation.

However, sometimes you may find the process not much efficient. In such case, go for a commercial software application, compacting the PST file in an efficient and timely manner.