Message compacting box

When I close Outlook Express, I get a message saying that Outlook Express could compact my messages to save disk space. I don't want to do this, so I click Cancel. But the next time I close the program, the same thing happens. Is there a way to make this prompt quit coming up?
I don't want to compact my messages because I have heard that this sometimes causes problems. I recently went through a situation where my wife's Inbox was replaced with a new Inbox. I think it may have happened after I checked Yes to the compacting question. If so, I don't want to take a chance on that happening again. I was able to eventually rescue those messages from the missing Inbox, through the usual expert help of this forum.
I did delete a bunch of old messages to clear up some space, but this is still happening. Any advice will be appreciated.

 

to add a little to Christer's good stuff above:

...actually, seems a good idea to keep all the folders from getting too large - "Sent Items" and "Deleted" posess a natural tendency to grow and grow if left unpruned

This is interesting. Bucksone - might the reason that you get the prompt every time simply be that you never let the thing compact - so it reckons that it's got past a hundred and is thus overdue? If that's the case, compacting the folders should reset the counter back to zero, and leave you unhassled by the prompt for a good while

I was wondering why I never see that prompt until I saw Christer's post, then the "penny dropped" - I compact my folders pretty frequently (manually, but with automatic timed email pickup disabled, so there's no chance of incoming during the process) so it never gets up to a hundred


best wishes, HJ

 

Hi Christer

ahh. Umm. Oh dear. Well, I thought it was quite a good idea at the time ...

looks more like resetting the count would have to be done by following the prompt then?

best wishes, HJ

 

email file size

I've just read the query and the various replies, and this is not really a 'reply', but a continuation of the discussion. Today I had reason to backup my email files, and I was surprised to find they would not fit on a 3.5 floppy (don't laugh, they did before and I don't keep much). I quickly discovered that, e.g., my DELETED box is 1.67Mb even tho' it's empty!. The same applies to other files - INBOX 1.86Mb, SENT .39Mb, etc. I tried compacting and it made no difference - the compaction facility says the files are zero size!. Any ideas as to what's going on, and how can I reduce the files if compaction doesn't work?

 

Tony King--If any of your OE "boxes" are empty and/or there are no messages you care to save, you can delete the corresponding .dbx files from your OE Store Folder. (You can find the location of the Store Folder from OE Tools|Maintenance|Store Folder.) When you reboot, new .dbx files should be created, presumably really empty.

 

Thanks Christer for the reference - very interesting. Thanks also Welshjim - I deleted my empty Deleted Items box as suggested and it has reverted to a reasonable size. After a few moments thought I realised that the way to compact any other file was to move its items to one of the other folders, delete it as before, restart OE and move the files back again! What a palaver! Still, at least there is a way to do it, thanks to the knowledgeable subscribers to WindowsBBS.

 

Tony King--You are welcome, and thanks to you for posting back. Always good to hear that a suggestion helped!