I read with interest your article on creating a separate .PST file for dealing with junk mail. I was wondering if this technique could be modified to use for email storage after opening? I ask because our Corporate IT department has imposed a 500MB limit on PST files for all employees -- no exceptions!

However, I'm in a department that conducts a scientific conference of 11,000 attendees with >4,000 technical speakers (and their associated technical papers and PowerPoint files). In addition, I manage 6-8 other conferences a year -- but which are on a somewhat smaller scale.

Needless to say, in a calendar year, I receive thousands of emails and attachments that I move into many sub-folders so that I can quickly find them as needed. Also to assist me finding emails, I use Google Desktop and Yahoo Desktop. However, having to weekly archive many emails that are still 'active' causes many delays and makes me less productive.

I was wondering if I could create different .PST files for 'storing' active emails to avoid the 500MB limitations? Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Easy answer is: sure. There's more to it, though. There always is.

First, the article Rich talks about is "A quick trick for deleting enormous amounts of junk email". The basic premise is that you can create a separate PST file for your junk mail and when it gets full, just delete the file. This saves a ton of time rather than deleting hundreds or thousands or, if you're like me, hundreds of thousands of junk messages.

There are some gotchas to lots of open PST files. Apparently there's a bug in Outlook 2003. I know. You're shocked. Anyway, this bug sometimes prevents you from adding more PST files to your profile. Fortunately, there's a Microsoft-documented workaround. You can read all about it at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907651/en-us.

Finally, I have no idea how this would work in Outlook 2007. We're still try to get our arms around that beast and I'd steer clear of overtaxing Outlook 2007 until we've all got a lot more experience with it.

For more than 20 years, David Gewirtz, the author of Where Have All The Emails Gone? and The Flexible Enterprise has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and can be reached via email at david@zatz.com.