Hi all



I am running Office 2016 on Microsoft Windows 10.

In the recent months (well....maybe even longer than that) Outlook has been shutting down regularly - mostly just "out of the blue" and sometimes even when I´m not really actively working with Outlook.

I don´t remember the exact error message before it shuts down - but it´s something like "Outlook is shutting down and will restart".

Several times now I have made repairs via "Scanpst.exe" and normally it gets a bit better with fewer shutdowns - at least for some time, but then after some time it gets back to normal with frequent shutdowns. Every time i make the scan and repair, the system tells me it found errors.

I have created MANY subfolders in Outlook and I probably have stored around 5.000 messages in those subfolders. Some of those messages are with attachments.
The size of the PST-file (which I have placed on a hard drive that is NOT the same hard drive where I have Windows 10 - if that has any relevance) - is around 2,3 Gb.

My own theory is that Outlook can´t handle that many messages - but I dont know for sure if that could be the problem here. Of course I could start deleting some of the old messages, but I am renting out 2 beach houses (my own beach house and the house of my sister) - and there is a lot of E-mail correspondance - and I want to be able to access old messages too without too much work.

How does the "archive" function in Outlook work? Until now I never enabled it - but could that be a solution? Maybe I can archive messages that are older than 1 year. I have heard that archiving in Outlook it will create a separate PST file for the archived messages.

Any help how to solve my problem is very much appreciated. Thank you.

Hi,

When Outlook keeps shut down, there can be many possible reasons towards this that include: bad PST files, Oversized PST files, unnecessary Add-Ins issues, etc.
As I understood you've already tried running Inbox repair tool but sometimes this won’t resolved your problem. Try disabling Add-Ins but first start your computer in safe mode.

Here are few steps, you need to follow:

Click Start >> in the search box, type Run
In the Run command box, type outlook.exe /safe (maintaining the gap between outlook.exe and /safe) to open your Outlook in safe mode.

When Outlook is opened in safe mode, follow the below steps to disable Add-Ins:

Start Outlook >> click File >> click Options
Click Add-Ins >> Add-in Options...
Navigate to COM Add-ins >> click Go...
Uncheck all the boxes to deselect Add-Ins >> click OK.

Archive is a feature in Outlook that helps to store the unused PST emails that you don’t need for a longer time. There are two types: Auto Archive and Manually Archive. It provides an option to filter emails to move them into archive folder. Like date wise, year wise. Like you said that you want to archive your emails that are older than one year.
Follow these steps to move all the emails that are older than a year into Archive folder:

Start Outlook >> click Tools >> click other >> click on “AutoArchive”
Navigate clean out items older than and set them to value 12 Months and click OK.

Thanks & Regards
Anjlua

@Anjlua
Thank you for your comment.

As of now I solved the problem by uninstalling and reinstalling Office 2016, but I am quite sure the problem will return again eventually.

I will then try the procedures you described.