Outlook 2007 issues

I've nearly had enough of Outlook 2007 and am seriously considering something like Firebird instead.

The guys appear to have added quite a few new features in 2007 over 2003 but have also created far more problems than I'm prepared to put up with.

I've now solved one of the most annoying which was performance related - how can anything run slowly on a 2.2 GHz Dual Core with 4GB RAM and a 64GB solid state disk!

The problem appears to be that Outlook offline data files were designed for very small mailboxes - I suspect the underlying architecture is very similar to that in a PST file. Somewhere in the design must be a hash-table and leafs of a b-tree and that b-tree is very much overflowing in a modern email environment.

I'm a power user and don't deny it and I like to keep almost every non-spam email I receive - they are an invaluable resource on a day to day basis. For that reason my .OST file was nearly 8GB - large - but not unreasonable with the bloat that is a XLS or DOC file.

The issue is that performance drops to unacceptable and although I can't hear the thrashing I can see that the SSD is being worked ridiculously hard by the flashing disk activity light.

The answer has been to do the following, and although it works for me because of the way I store my emails it won't work for everyone.

I personally like to keep archives in a chronological manner - maybe it's just me but I find it fairly easy to guess a date for something and from there honing in on the right thing is fairly easy. For that reason I simply have subfolders under the inbox and sent-items for 1997, 1998, 1999 etc through to 2007.

I generally keep 3 months worth of current emails in my Inbox and Sent Items and archive into the subfolders every month or two.

What I've ended up doing is copying the data (not moving) from all of the yearly folders into a PST file (with the exception of 2007).

This has resulted in a 2.7GB PST file.

The next thing I've done is to set the synchronisation filter for the yearly folders to only synchronise unread emails - in other word nothing. This leaves the emails where they belong - on the Exchange server - in an appropriate folder but means that my OST file has shrunk to just over 1GB.

Maybe it's an indication of how bad the OST structure is that the disk space required for this solution has almost halved. I can't think why other than Unicode/ANSI text issues.

I've made the PST file read-only and will copy it to each of my machines as an offline copy of data that won't change (well only at the beginning of each year when I move a whole additional years worth of mail into the PST).

The main reason the solution is acceptable is that Windows Desktop Search is able to index PST files and seamlessly integrates the results with those from the Inbox.

Windows Desktop Search is one of those applications I love to hate - but it works - which is why it annoys me as it really does solve problems such as these by bringing together results so effectively.

A solution which so far is proving far better than Outlook alone would provide - all I need to solve now is why Outlook keeps forgetting my favourite public folders...