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E-Mail at 24 Inches of Mercury

March 20, 2003

Some days Outlook sucks so badly it pulls a hard vacuum. For me, today is one of them.  I like the idea of Outlook—in fact, I have for several generations.  It’s just the implementation that seems to lead to acts of explosive digital decompression. 

First and foremost, it does not handle a lot of mail gracefully.  I have (and keep) an enormous amount of mail, admittedly, but surely I can’t be the only one.  Outlook has a hard limit of 2 gig in a datafile (this is an OS limit, but it can’t be like the developers didn’t know it was there, and couldn’t plan on dealing with it gracefully).  If you ever hit this, you’re done as far as that mailfile is concerned (at least in Outlook XP).  You essentially can’t do anything, including delete mail to try to get under it. 

The only fix seems to be the “universal Outlook fix”—start a new data file, and copy (you can’t “move”, since move implies a delete) stuff from the old one to the new one.  You also get to remember where to change the setting to make this the default mail destination in the current version, and you get to re-do all of your rules to point to the new mailfolders, despite their having the same name as the old ones.  This process clocks in at about 4 hours for me, at least as of this morning.

The closer you get to this limit, the slower Outlook gets.  It takes forever to load, it hogs CPU time to run rules (this is better than it was in previous versions), and it can take forever to gracefully exit.  During each of these processes, there appears to be a window during which the data file is vulnerable to corruption should the machine crash or get reset.

Corrupted data files require the use of the “Inbox Repair Tool”.  I’ve never had this do anything meaningful other than waste my time; I’ve certainly never recovered a data file. The alternative seems to the old “Universal Fix” described above, and forget any folders or messages that are damaged.

The idea of Outlook is great.  It’s nice to have your to-dos, calendars, contacts, etc. in your mail program.  Even more, if you want to do anything that does “universal in-box” type stuff, such as synch with a handheld, you tend to be stuck with Outlook.  My Outlook talks to my Palm Pilot, it accumulates my voicemail (use caution here, this is a great way to bloat up a datafile), and most recently it does RSS aggregation for me with NewsGator (which is a neat toy).  It’s all very nice when it’s working right. But when it’s broken so is much of my infrastructure.

Hope springs eternal, however—theres a new version on the horizon, and perhaps this time they spent more time fixing problems than they did making it even more ubiquitous.  I’m not holding my breath however…

(Hmmm… my spellchecker suggests “malevolence” as the correct spelling for “mailfile”—I wonder if this is a coincidence…)



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Written by User ImageChuck Lawson · Filed Under Tech 
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