Prevent Outlook Express from Compacting Messages

You receive the following error message:

To free up disk space Outlook Express can compact messages. This may take a few minutes.

Note: This may occur even if you do not regularly use Outlook Express.

After installing Service Pack 2, Outlook Express is set to ask about compacting messages after every 100th closing of Outlook Express. You can stop the messages by reseting the registry value which keeps track of how many times Outlook Express has been closed. Just follow these steps:

Note: If you are actually using Outlook Express you will need to manually compact the messages before proceeding. If you continually reset the counter without compacting the messages, it could corrupt the message store.

1. Go to START > Run and type “regedit”
2. Locate the followings key in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Identities\{GUID}\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express\5.0

1. Double click “Compact Check Count” to edit
2. Change the value to zero and close regedit

More Info:

http://www.insideoe.com/faqs/why.htm#compact