Outlook Hotmail Connector producing immense OST files
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2012年5月10日 19:16When checking the size of the Outlook folder for my Hotmail account, Outlook 2010 was displaying the total size as 2.5 GB. The total size on disk was 50GB. Thinking that the OST file was corrupt, I ran scanpst on the OST file. It found errors but broke the integration with Hotmail (the usual send/receive error that I have yet to see a resolution on.). So I backed up the old OST file, setup a new connection to Hotmail and re-downloaded everything locally. The local file was 2.5GB. Fast forward a week and my OST file is back up to 50GB. What's causing the OST file to grow to 20x the size of the actual messages? Indexing information? Is there a way to prevent this file from getting that large? When it hits 50GB the system's disk thrashes and apps freeze based on what must be blocking calls to the drive - and I'm on an SSD!
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2012年5月10日 21:48
Do you have anything in sync errors folders? Do you subscribe to any RSS feeds? (The last 50 GB pst I saw was the result of RSS feeds.)
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
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2012年5月14日 6:58I also have a huge .ost file for my Hotmail account. I do get sync errors all the time. The error message I see is,
"Task 'xxxxx@live.com' reported error (0x80004005) : 'There is an error synchronizing your mail account. Please verify your account is configured correctly by first accessing your mail on the web. Error: 4401.'" I see this error constantly, but syncing works correctly often enough that I have just been ignoring it. I do not use RSS. Does the sync problem lead to a huge .ost file? How can I fix the sync problem? -
2012年5月14日 14:23
Syncing by itself is not a problem and won't cause the file to grow, however, the sync issues folder could be full of sync messages. Try clearing out the safe & blocked senders list.
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
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2012年5月16日 20:44I cleared my safe and blocked senders lists. That did not eliminate the sync errors, but it seems to have improved them. I am currently getting about 3 sync errors per day. Previously, I was getting about 30 per day. Any other suggestions?
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2012年6月6日 17:23
Only have 161 items in the folder over a 1 month period. I don't subscribe to RSS feeds. I just went in and added up all the folder sizes in the Hotmail OST - We're looking at 4GB, but for some reason on disk it's at 50GB. Outlook has a tendency to lock now - but I'm pretty sure that's a result of the 50GB OST file and not other issues. I just wish I could figure out where the additional 46GB of data was going.
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2012年6月6日 17:26I've cleared out the safe/blocked senders list. (I had a problem with this early on - Hotmail support had to reset them on the backend in order for me to use sync with Outlook at all.)
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2012年8月27日 11:39
Of course doing this did nothing. I've recreated the ost file, created the account under a new outlook profile, removed and re-installed connector and done just about everything I can think of but the OST file keeps growing to 50GB. Immediately after re-creating it is a nice normal size and then it continues to grow until hitting the outlook size limit at which point outlook becomes unusable.
I'm not the only person who's seen this but nobody seems to have a solution:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windowslive/forum/hotmail-email/not-able-to-remove-invalid-items-from-the-safe/693331fd-7c12-4bab-b9b6-deca9ff08baf?msgId=1959b70e-f61f-44b6-8339-02d69c5dc33e
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-outlook/outlook-hotmail-connector-14061065001-local/338b1b67-59ba-487d-9352-cf2d470c93ef?msgId=d6b7ada4-5efb-4a3f-be4b-88554d36b868
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2012年8月27日 12:22
Did you check the Sync error folders?
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
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2012年8月27日 12:25
Getting the following (I've removed all contacts from both Outlook and Hotmail in order to try and resolve but still get the error on contacts.)
17:17:32 Unable to authenticate to Windows Live Calendar.
17:17:32 Synchronization error.
17:17:32 Folder Collection Sync Key: 0{66b6884e-18c7-48f6-b5b5-42f72c8a1b1c}2
17:17:32 Message Collection Sync Key: 0{816ce6ed-50a7-46cf-967d-8134a5c984ee}684
17:17:33 Error with Send/Receive.
17:17:33 There was an error synchronizing your folder hierarchy. Error : 80041004.
17:17:33 Synchronizing server changes in folder 'Hotmail Calendar'
17:17:33 Synchronizing server changes in folder 'Contacts'
17:17:33 Error with Send/Receive.
17:17:33 There was an error synchronizing a contacts folder. Error : 80041004.
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2012年8月27日 12:39
For There was an error synchronizing your folder hierarchy. Error : 80041004. - do you have any folders with non-alphanumeric characters? I'd try using only alphanumeric characters to see if it helps. I need to ask the Connector's product manager about another issue today, will mention this as well.
How many sync error messages are in those folders? That could account for the large file size.
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
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2012年8月27日 12:47
There are no folders with non-alphanumeric characters and only 39 error messages. Mail seems to synchronize so I don't know if these errors are sporadic. I get maybe 3 or 4 a day but I synch my mail much more often than that.
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2012年9月12日 14:22
Does anyone know of a third party tool that inspects OST files? I just want to know where the space is being used - It seems like blank space because I never lose anything, emails continue to send/receive, but because of the size Outlook constantly locks. It's almost like the OST file grows with blank data but compacting does not work (or you can't with hotmail connector and running scanpst results in a corrupted ost file).
I've recreated this under multiple profiles to rule out corruption with the OST file. I've recreated it on other systems as well.
Getting to the point where I'm about to give up the old Hotmail account if I can't use it from Outlook.
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2012年9月12日 16:29MFCMAPI should allow you to browse the ost file. Not sure it will show you what you want to see though. Other known tools are here - http://www.slipstick.com/addins/developer-tools-for-outlook/ i don't know if any offer anything more than mfcmapi would.
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
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2012年10月20日 20:35Thanks for the tip on this one - I wasn't able to find any unusual messages taking up space in the OST file - I'm going to try rebuilding the OST file and disabling all Outlook add-ins. I'm hoping that may help as I've noticed on some message boards that Outlook add-ins seem to cause similar problems on Exchange based offline OST files.
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2012年10月25日 14:11
It's not the plug-ins. Five days later with no plug-ins, I'm back to 50GB.
I guess I should also note, Outlook/this machine has not been turned off in those five days.
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2012年11月12日 5:10I should have thought about this earlier - I just forced a sync and the OST file gets bigger even though no new items are added/no errors. Is Hotmail connector keeping internal logfiles for syncs? I didn't see them with MFCMAPI but something is causing the file to grow every time I hit send/receive. It's growing about 30-40MB per refresh.
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2013年1月2日 20:57No idea what's going on - I changed the maximum PST file size in the registry to 100GB and now I have a 100GB pst file for 3GB of messages.
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2013年1月2日 21:50
I'll see what I can find out.
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Outlook & Exchange Solutions Center
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2013年1月3日 23:14
My support contact says... "custom search folders and anti-virus have been tied to OST bloat. The customer could try deleting any custom search folders or disable anti-virus to test.
This would be a long shot but can’t hurt to try: He can set the registry key in this KB to see if it helps minimize the OST size http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968413. It might be best to set the key and then start with a fresh OST file."
If none of this is helpful you should open a support case.
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Outlook & Exchange Solutions Center
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2013年1月4日 14:58
Does security essentials count as an AV app - everything else is turned off but I'll try it.
No search folders in the outlook OST.
Interesting side note - when I increased the max PST size to 100GB - it grew to 100GB but I am no longer noticing the 25% CPU utilization (100% for one core) and locking in Outlook like I did when the limit was 50GB. I don't like using more storage than needed but at least Outlook is usable.
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2013年1月4日 15:48
No, SE shouldn't count as it does not scan email.
It shouldn't be 100GB - and it shouldn't have grown immediately upon changing the setting. I really think you should open a support case with Microsoft - they are investigating a couple of similar cases and more data might help them solve it.
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Outlook & Exchange Solutions Center
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2013年2月21日 3:45
I have the same problem as Christopher. Using Outlook Hotmail Connector, when I view the folder size of the account it reports about 2 GB of data. The OST file size on disk is currently 36 GB. Fortunately mine doesn't grow as fast as Christopher's seems to, but it does keep growing and growing over time. The only remedy I've found so far is to delete the account from Outlook and recreate it. After the initial re-sync my OST file will be around 3 GB, but a couple months later it'll be back up to 30-40 GB. Since this is on a laptop with limited storage space it's quite annoying.
For what it's worth, 1.3 GB of the folder size is in one particular sub-folder that contains 112,000 items (archive of an active email discussion list).
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2013年2月21日 3:56Forgot to mention that according to the folder size numbers, I have only 1 MB in the sync errors folder. (How do I see the contents of that folder? It doesn't seem to be listed in the folder tree.) I also do not have any custom searches set up.
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