By David Gewirtz
One of the nice things about reaching a large audience is that we sometimes learn about products from our readers. After running our series on large .pst files, I got the following letter from Jean-Paul Peretz. It's very intriguing, so we're reprinting it here.
I followed with interest your series of articles on large .pst files. I am the U.S. rep for AddOnMail, a publisher of Outlook plug-ins. We know first-hand about the problems caused by large .pst files and we publish several tools addressing this specific issue.
- MailControl, monitors the size of .pst files by warning users and optionally blocking the reception of new messages
- PSTmanager, transparently compacts .pst files
We take a different tack with attachment management. Since the main goal of saving messages with attachments is to keep track of who sent what when and to who, AttachTracker simply writes the mailing information into the files' properties so that the attachament can be saved outside Outlook and the message deleted.
Also as a tool of last recourse, we are currently showing PSTstation at ITforum in Barcelona. PSTstation is a tool that scans and repairs corrupted (large) .pst files and safely backs them up.
We're obviously very interested in PSTstation and intend to report our test results in a future issue. As part of this process, we're looking for bad PST files to run against this tool. If you've got a corrupted .pst file and don't mind sharing it with the OutlookPower Labs please send it on a CD or DVD to:
OutlookPower Labs
Attn: Corrupted .pst project
PO Box 110579
Palm Bay, FL 32911
We won't do anything with your file except test it against any .pst repair programs we have. Please only send these whopper files to us on physical media (and include your contact information). We don't guarantee we'll fix your files, we can't say if we'll even do anything with them, and there's no guarantee we'll send them back to you, nor do we guarantee their security (although we certainly won't be doing anything with them except sticking them on test machines).
Enough disclaimers. If you want to send us your test files, go ahead.
