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What do you use to search archived e-mail in a pst?


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I have been archiving my e-mails and when I need to search for something it starts indexing after I open the folder, and its seems like it is trying to index the whole pst.

What do you use to search for an e-mail and its contents after you open the archived .pst file?

Due to this problem, I have been archiving less and less, but with 5GB limit on Exchange server, I cannot keep more than 6-7 months worth of e-mails, and when I archive them I lose the index and I can never find the e-mail anymore.

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What I ended up trying for one installation was to create a 2nd Outlook profile. e.g. the main one is the one that is used for normal day-to-day email. The 2nd profile just has all the archived .pst files connected to it. In theory Windows Search will index all the .pst files connected to an Outlook profile, but I'm not 100% sure it will always index the archive .pst files in the other profile.

On first glance this setup did seem to work fine, but when I checked it again later on it didn't look like it was finding stuff in the archived .pst files in the other profile. So I can't really say this definitely works, but may be worth a try?

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I use one (10GB) pst file that is permanently open in Outlook. That way the archive is always indexed. Seems to work well for me.

This - at work the Exchange server limit is a paltry 300MB; I just keep my archive open in Outlook and drag messages to it when I'm done with them (or delete them if they're unimportant). Keeping it open means it stays indexed and I can perform instant searches on it.

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Thanks for the suggestion, it sounds like keeping it open is the only way, but it is a mammoth sized 21GB pst.. I made a mistake of accumulating it, and now I learned my lesson, and I will create a new PST for all archives from 1/2012 and later. The problem is, I have to wait until april/may to do this because I try to keep at least 4-5 months on my server. It helps when searching from blackberry.

The problem is even if I want to split the old one into two or three, it would take me forever because Auto Archive doesn't seem to work well with e-mails originally generated by a different computer/different version of Outlook. It can't spot the correct dates, so it leaves e-mails in the folder without archiving them.

I was hoping there was some sort of 3rd party index utility, where we could just feed the .pst and it would index them, and later we could search and see where the e-mail we are looking for is stored, then manually navigate to it to open it, or possibly a small preview would show in this tool. Next time we could feed the pst and it would index only the difference.

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I have an archive pst open in Outlook 2010 (C:\Users\Me\Archive\Archive.pst). I find it rather trivial to search it. Just select it, goto the search tab, select "All Subfolders" and type in your search.

I move all of my emails from my works exchange server to the Archive.pst file yearly and back it up on an external drive.

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Outlook 2003 and newer can use 20GB pst files. To search very easily inside Outlook press CTRL+SHIF+F.

When I try that, I immediately receive "There are no items to show in this view" in results window.

It shows "Look for: Messages" "In: Archive", and I also choose subfolders. I also tried with a single subfolder as well, doesn't work.

I guess it just needs to stay open, which goes back to my problem of having over 21GB file open all the time.

If there is no other way, I will start with a new Archive PST for my new archives.

Either outlook deletes the index after a certain period of time a PST is not opened, or it just never gets to index because it is so huge.

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