Deleting Files (Windows XP; Outlook)

I’m trying to clean up my hard drive, and part of that is deleted some large files I received by e-mail.

  1. If I delete the e-mail w/ the attachment, does Windows delete the attachment, too, or do I have to go into some directory or folder to delete the attachments?

  2. Same thing for sent files. If I to into the SENT folder of Outlook and delete the mail, is the attachment deleted, too?

For some reason I have this sneaking suspicion that I have some large files hidden somewhere in an Outlook file.

In both cases, it first gets moved to your Deleted Items folder (rather like the Recycle Bin for deleted files) - if it is deleted from there (i.e. permanently deleted), I assume that it is gone for good.

Having said that, there was an add-on that you could load onto Outlook (not sure if it was official or not) that would allow you to restore items deleted from Deleted Items - our IT support guys at the place I worked at in London installed that for us when our Legal department managed to permanently delete some relevant emails. But perhaps that only works if the disk space hasn’t been reused yet…

Grim

You may want to compact your mail file - it should happen automatically in the background, but if you just whacked a bunch of stuff and want to see how space it is currently using, amanual compaction would do that for you.

Also, deleting the item (and then cleaning up your deleted items folder) will take care of the attachment.

You can sort emails by size - you just have to add the size column. If you look in the mailbox properties there’s a button to tell you the folder sizes.

BTW If you’re using Outlook 2003 or before, they tend to get iffy as the mailbox or PST approaches 2 GB.

To expand a bit: (and for pedants, taking the simple case)

ALL your Outlook mail is stored in one (possibly gigantic) disk file. It’s in effect a database which contains each mail as a record with its associated attachments. The “folders” you see in Outlook are not in any sense mapped to real disk folders; they’re just categories tagged to each mail item.

The mail item & its attachments are indelibly connected. There can be no such thing as a free-floating attachment. You could think of *each *record as essentially a *single *zip file containing the mail text and the attachments. That’s not technically accurate in detail, but the concept is correct.

When you delete an item, the database record which holds both the text of the mail and the attachments is marked with a flag meaning “this item is deleted”. The “deleted items” folder you see is just a query which returns the items with that flag set. And all the other folders know not to retrieve items with that flag set.

When you empty the “deleted items” folder, you’re setting another flag on those records which means “this item is really, * really *deleted”. And those items are not returned in the query which populates the “deleted items” folder in the UI. So the item has irretrievably disappeared from view.

But it’s still sitting on disk as an entry in the ginormous database file. And although Outlook can’t, a third party tool could go in, find the item, and unset the “this item is really really deleted” flag & it would miraculously reappear. The tool **grimpixie **was talking about does that.

When you compact the database file, all the live entries are moved to the front, overlaying any deleted items along the way and the now-unused space at the end is dropped from the file. That’s the first time the OS gains any disk space back, and that’s the first time a deleted mail & its attachments become, for all practical purposes, completely unrecoverable.

So, if I have BigFile.pdf on my disc drive, and then I mail it to someone, another copy of BigFile.pdf is created and added to the database file? I always figured there was just a pointer to the original file. And if I send BigFile.pdf multiple times, I get multiple copies in the database file?

If that’s true, then yikes. I gots me some serious compactin’ to do!

:smack: Of course it can’t just point to the original file, since that file might have changed since it was sent. Just tried the manual compact solution, but had to abort-- it was taking forever. I’ll do it over night.

Before you try compacting, look at your folder sizes, then compare that with the size of the pst files. If there’s little difference, then don’t bother compacting.