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by prawn 5185 days ago
Which is great unless your PST hits the 2GB mark and corrupts. Has happened to me a few times and it makes for a distressing and wasted period of time. Newer Outlooks are meant to avoid the limit but an upgrade didn't help me last time.
2 comments

Which version are you talkin about? There were a 2GB limit in Outlook Express (the free one shipped with XP and i suppose older ones) for its dbx files: when you reach the 2GB limit, you cant receive (or send) files anymore. It was particularly nasty if it happened on your sent folders, because emails were continously pulled from outgoing, sent to receivers, failed to copy into sent, copied again in outgoing for the next send cycle, so if you didnt intervene you'll have people flooded. Office Outlook (the paid outlook) had not this problem (at least since 2003 to 2010), I manage a network of 100 users circa and we use Outlook for multiple personal and office IMAP accounts, and some of them are way larger than 2GB. Sometimes corruption happens on PST files, but I cant relate it to their dimension.

And, by the way, you can always use Mozilla Thunderbird

Microsoft acknowledge that PST files can corrupt when they hit the 2 GB limit in Outlook Standard Edition 97, 98, 2000, 2002:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296088: "This problem occurs because the .pst and the .ost files have a 2 gigabyte (GB) size limitation, and the error message occurs when it is exceeded. "

Solution: don't use Outlook. Better use e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird.
I don't quite like the way Thunderbird works. I use it for one account, but not my main work. Would love to give up Outlook though.
I don't really pay much attention to version numbers, but first had it with an older version (97 or 02?) then again with 07 it might've been? Whatever I'm using has the Ribbon.
Better: fetchmail and/or offlineimap, stored to a real mail storage format, preferably maildir.

Available on all sane platforms. Linux distros natively, Mac OS X (you might need to go to DarwinPorts for the software), and Windows (via Cygwin).

Note with offlineimap, changes on the server (e.g.: mail deletions) will be reflected on your local archive when re-synched. If your goal is archival, you'll want to copy the local mail you want to save permanently elsewhere.