Background Compaction: An Evil For Outlook Express Folders

                                                                                         

Outlook Express e-mails, like other files, can get fragmented and fragmentation is the other name of corruption. So Outlook Express includes a powerful feature of automatically maintaining the process of compaction, called Background Compaction. The feature is activated by default which waits for some idle time in Outlook Express and then begins to compact your DBX or MBX folders.  Though the feature is helpful in separating off some corruption scenarios from the folders, but ironically t ay prove harmful too. In other words, the compaction has itself been found in making the OE folders corrupt.  When Outlook Express is busy doing compaction and in the mean time, if the system gets crashed, power supply gets broken up or the connection gets failed, the later results come in the form of corruption to the folders. In some of the systems, having limited RAM or slow processors, the ongoing background compaction also results in the damaged DBX or MBX folders. Moreover, the performance issues have also been seen while the process. So the process is never safe for the data as it would require Outlook Express recovery later on.  This would be good if you turn off the feature by simply removing the check mark for ‘Compact messages in the background’, which you will get in Tools->Options->Maintenance. On the other hand, users, having Windows XP SP2 installed, need not to worry at all as this deadly feature has been removed in this service pack. 

About the author:
Andrew Watson is a student of Mass Communication doing research on http://www.stellarinfo.com/file-recovery.htm>File Recovery software. He is also a freelancer for http://www.stellarinfo.com

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