Outlook 2003 Archiving Not Working?

[JustinCarmony]

I've been noticing my Outlook has been running rather slow at
gathering and searching for mail. I could hear my hard drive just spin
away and away as it used Outlook. I decided to look at my Outlook data
files, and my Outlook.pst is 776,094,720 bytes. I'm running of a
laptop is just an average laptop hard drive, so I figured the slowness
with accessing 740 Megs would slow things down.

So I turned on AutoArchive and watched as more than 20,000 emails were
archived. The archive.pst grew to 144,262,144 bytes, but I looked at
my Outlook.pst file and it had stayed the same size. Am I doing
something wrong, or is there a bug? This completely defeats the
purpose of Archiving is my outlook is staying the same size.

Thank you in advance for reading this and any help you can provide!

 

[Roady [MVP]]

That is normal behavior for a database; it won't directly remove whitespace
to return free diskspace to the OS. This is because constant growing and
shrinking will cause much more overhead. If you want to force the return of
white space right click the root of the folderset (Outlook Today)->
Properties-> Advanced-> Compact Now