Outlook occupy too much space

The database may be damaged, or, it may be too big.

Office 2011 and older clung to the artificial size limit of 2 GB for the database. If it's close to, or at that size, that could prevent Outlook from working with it.

There is a way out of it, though. A bit tedious, but not difficult. What you're going to do is essentially a manual rebuild. The first steps are to protect yourself from losing data.

1) Do an export. Choose all relevant check boxes.

Save the exported data to your desktop, or wherever else you wish.

Double up on your backup types:

2) Export again, and choose to export only the contacts as tab-delimited text.

3) Create a folder named Inbox on your desktop. Open the Inbox in Outlook. Highlight all live emails and then drag and drop them to the folder on the desktop. It will save all emails from the Inbox as .eml files. They do include any attachments. Make new folders that match the names of any other folders in Outlook you want the contents saved for (such as Sent) and repeat saving the individual emails out to the desktop.

You now have two full backups. One generated as a single database using Export, and individual manual backups of everything you want saved. The latter does not include tasks, notes, or calendar events. But those are in the full export. The main reason for saving all of the individual emails is it gives you more than one way to bring them back in.

4) Back in Outlook, delete all emails from all folders (Inbox, Sent, Deleted Items, etc.) With all email folders empty, now quit Outlook and run the Database Utility again. With nothing to do but clear out the hidden deleted emails, it should (hopefully) finish.

5) If it does finish normally, the newly rebuilt Main Identity folder should be pretty small. Import the database you exported. All emails, contacts and such that were live should come back in.

6) If it does not finish normally, close the utility and simply trash the entire Main Identity folder. Launch Outlook. It will ask to set up a new user since it will think you're using it for the first time. Choose to import the exported data.

One way or the other, it can be fixed.

Okay, go to step three, then. With Outlook open, manually copy out all of the emails to folders on your desktop. One like-named desktop folder for each folder in Outlook; Inbox, Sent, Drafts and any others you may have created.

For your contacts, click on the icon to display your list of contacts. Click on any one and then press Command+A to select all. Right click anywhere in the selected list and choose Forward as vCard. An email to send will appear with a whole bunch of .vcf files already attached. Click on any one of the attachments and then choose all. Create yet another folder on the desktop. Give it the obvious name, Contacts. Drag and drop, or choose to save all of the .vcf attachments to that folder.

Go back to Outlook and highlight all contacts again. Right click on the list and choose Copy Contact Details. Open TextEdit and paste the contents into a new document. You'll get a simple list of contact names followed by their email addresses. Save the file.

At this point, you should have all emails and contacts saved to your desktop.

Lastly, go to the top menu bar in Outlook and choose, Tools > Accounts. Click on your account in the left column (presumably, the only one), and take screen shots of all settings and entries. Make sure to click the More Options button under Outgoing Server, and the Advanced button. Take screen shots of each tab.

You now have the information you need to setup your email account in a new identity.

Quit Outlook. Move the current Main Identity folder in your user account out to the desktop, or somewhere for safe keeping. Launch Outlook. It will ask to create a new account. Use the screen shots to manually fill in your account information.

Recreate any folders in Outlook that aren't there by default. That is, match the folder names of emails you saved to the desktop. For each folder of .eml files, drag and drop them onto the matching folder name in the left column in Outlook. Every email will come back in as if it's new and hasn't been read before. Repeat for all saved emails.

Now for the crummy part. There isn't a way to import vCards into Outlook. Saving them in the step above was just to have more than one backup of your contacts. You can import them into Apple's Contacts app, but you still can't get them from there into Outlook.

That means you have to manually re-enter each contact from the TextEdit list you saved. If you have a lot, it will take a while, but at least you can copy/paste the data instead of typing it out.

It doesn't matter if you have a major issue while trying to do the manual rebuild. If you do, just trash the new Main Identity folder and try again. Remember, you have the original Main Identity folder set aside so you can put it back if necessary to pull other information out. Just don't destroy that copy until you're done, and are certain you have all of your data back into the newly, recreated account. Back that up when done, and then you can ditch the old folder.

Oh, I know what you mean, now.

I can only think of two reasons the utility would hang during the process.

1) The database is damaged, and it's stalling on records it can't process.

2) The disk is almost full and it doesn't have room to write the rebuilt database and/or the temporary files it creates during the process.

For the the second, make sure your drive has at least 5 GB of free space. If it doesn't, you need to clear files off the drive you no longer need. Or, if needed, move them to an external drive so you can free up space on the startup drive.

This should be done regardless, if your free space is low.

Nothing is actually happening in step 4. It's just an explanation that you after step three completes, you'll have two folders in your user account. They would be:

Main Identity

Main Identity [12-14-2017]

Or something like that for the backed up folder (second name). I can't remember how the utility exactly writes the date in the brackets.

So it would have to either step 3 or 5 that's hanging. Either the rebuild isn't finishing (step 3), or the newly rebuilt database isn't opening (step 5).

Which one is hanging?

I am having this same problem and I am not sure I understood your way of action for 2016.

There isn't much to it. Delete all emails you no longer need from the Inbox, Drafts, Sent Items and any other folders you may have created to separate and save emails to. Now highlight the Deleted Items folder in the left column. Click anywhere in the right column. It doesn't matter where. Press Command+A to highlight all emails in the right column. Click the Delete icon (you can also press the Delete or Backspace key on the keyboard). Confirm you want to remove the items.

Hi Kurt

This is super helpful except it keeps hanging when it gets to step 4. I have retried this since yesterday and it keeps freezing.

How long should it take?

Thanks so much

Cara

Sorry - I perhaps did not elaborate here.

In the actual rebuild, there are 5 steps that Utility takes to create the new identity. My rebuild keeps hanging at step 4 out of 5.

Thanks!

I think it may be the first issue as I have space available for the rebuilt database.

Do you perhaps have any advise on resolving this?

Thanks again!

Thank you for the reply.

I began the export and it said that I have to rebuild the Database in order to export using Database Utility. So now I am back to square one 😟

Hey there

here is how to check and optmize Mac disk space.

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH10677

You can also trythe free tool in Mac app store.it can help improve your storage and performance as well as your Outlook email problem.

I strongly recommend against the installation or use of Dr.Clean as recommended by perfectandmac. In my testing of any of the so called cleaning apps for Mac I have found to be either worthless or dangerous, with a few being both worthless and dangerous.

Try posting in Microsoft's Office for Mac forum

https://www.microsoft.com/mac/support

lllaass,

The new link to the MS Office:Mac forums is:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac

The older one you posted now routes to a rather hard-to-use FAQ section for Office 365 and mixes Mac and Win topics.

How easy it is to clean up your emails depends on which version of Outlook you're talking about - 2011 or 2016.

I found outlook distribute different folders in different size in folder Library.

Very vague. Do you mean the Library folder in your user account?

After a few moths, the occupied disk space grows higher and higher.

Why would this be surprising? You get and send more emails over time, you don't delete many or any of them, they take up more space. Especially those with large attachments.

Outlook 2011:

Everything is saved in your user account under one monolithic database within a folder named Main Identity. Your contacts, account settings, emails, etc. Quit Outlook and back up this folder before doing any of the following.

Launch Outlook again and look through the Inbox, Sent Items and Junk E-Mail folders. Highlight and delete anything you don't need.

Go to the Deleted Items folder. Mark all items and delete them so the folder is empty. While you would think you're done, you're not. All items deleted from the Deleted Items folder are still part of the Outlook 2011 database and are still taking up all of the disk space they did before you started deleting anything, except now they are hidden.

1) Quit Outlook.

2) Hold the Option key and launch Outlook. Instead of the normal interface, you will get the Microsoft Database Utility.

3) If you have only the one email account in your user account, the only item listed should be Main Identity, and it will already be highlighted. Click Rebuild.

4) When it's done, you'll have two entries. One by the same name, and one with the current date and time in brackets. The folder with the bracketed time stamp is a backup of the rebuilt database. The new, normally named database is the cleaned up one which now has all of the emails deleted from the Deleted Items folder actually removed from the database.

5) Close the utility and relaunch Outlook normally. Check it over to make sure you feel everything is there that's supposed to be (contacts, live emails, etc.). If it appears to you the database was rebuilt correctly, you can delete the backup.

If you've deleted many large emails over time and have never purged the database this way before, you could see a huge difference in the size between the newly rebuilt database, and what it was before.

Outlook 2016:

All data for this version of Outlook is in your user account at ~/Library/Group Containers/ in the folder named:

UBF8T346G9.Office

Close Outlook 2016 and back up this file before proceeding.

As in the 2011 instructions, look through the Inbox, Sent Items and Junk E-Mail folders. Highlight and delete anything you don't need. Go to the Deleted Items folder. Mark all items and delete them so the folder is empty.

That's it. They're gone. There is no utility you have to use to clear the deleted items from the database.

Thanks, I updated by bookmarks for the future

Allan Jones wrote:

lllaass,

The new link to the MS Office:Mac forums is:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac

The older one you posted now routes to a rather hard-to-use FAQ section for Office 365 and mixes Mac and Win topics.