Jack Laughter (such a cool name!) asked this:

I was reading your article about PST files getting too big and what to do about it. You said you could "make a new Unicode .pst file in Outlook 2003 and then, from within Outlook 2003, copy folders from one PST file to the other." My question is do you keep both pst files, or do you delete one once you are finished transferring all of your files? Also, if you keep them both, I noticed that the old one stays as the default and continues to receive your new emails. What are your recommendations? I have a lot of people here at the office that have pst files that are getting too big and need to fix this soon.

Jean Thomson asked pretty much the same thing:

Though you indicated moving all the .pst files into one location, I am still not sure how to combine them. I have had a series of computer crashes so have several sets of emails that I need to combine. I can't tell what is in any file but have tried importing each. Although I indicated that it is allowed to duplicate files, I seem to have overwritten all the latest emails with an older file. Is there any way to just combine them without overwriting the previous one?

I have tried renaming the personal folder so the imported one won't go to the original file, but it still recreates the old filing system and ignores my new personal folder.

Ask, and thee shall (once in a while) receive. This, one of those rare onces in a while, is your lucky day. What follows is a tutorial on combining PST files.

Creating the second PST file
Because I didn't want to screw with my own working email environment, I created a simple PST file demo on our test machine in the OutlookPower lab. To do this, I simply set up a fresh install of Outlook and dropped in a few folders in the default PST file. That's our starting point. You can see our folder structure in Figure A.

FIGURE A


Our demo folder structure, containing the mail folder "Fabulous Newsletters" Roll over picture for a larger image.

The first thing you'll need to do is create a second PST file. You can do this by hitting the Data File Management link on the screen, or by selecting Data File Management from the Outlook 2003 File menu. In any case, you'll see the dialog box shown in Figure B.