Outlook is a top program with a ton of handy features. However, with great power, comes great trouble. We love Microsoft Outlook, but just wish it wasn’t full of so many bugs and crashes. Below we will discuss how you can fix most of these troubles and get on with using your email, calendars, contacts and more.
Firstly, it is important to learn a little bit about how Outlook works and what causes some of the errors. Outlook keeps all of its data into a file known as a PST file. These PST files handle everything, including: email, contacts, calendars, journals and so on. If something happens to the PST file, Outlook can crash fast. It is all too simple for a PST file to become damaged, go missing or get deleted accidentally. Since everything is stored in this database, when something happens to it, there is a real problem.
Typical Outlook PST troubles
Damaged PST file: A very major problem. If your Outlook PST file becomes damaged for some reason, then you won’t be able to open it or use it. Your complete inbox and everything associated with it is rendered useless. Outlook PST file corruption can occur for various reasons, sometimes due to disk issues, Malware, Registry errors and so on. The point is, once it happens, all of your valuable email can be almost impossible to access. Luckily there are products that can fully fix and restore Outlook PST files. One of the leaders is Stellar PST Repair. Stellar will repair pretty much all Outlook troubles. There is also a free product with Microsoft, called Scanpst that will occasionally work too.
Oversized PST files: If you have an oversized PST file (larger than 2GB), your email can freeze completely. Email might seem like it’s working, but you won’t receive any email and there are no error message reports. This is a very annoying problem, often tricky to detect. So if you stop receiving email, but your connection is fine, check the size of your PST file. This applies to older versions of Outlook and especially to imap accounts. If you do have an oversized PST file, you will probably need to delete email from the server to reduce the size. Use archiving to avoid this problem in the future.
Email not working: If your email isn’t sending or receiving, this is probably just a small issue. Generally this is due to incorrect values placed into the outgoing and incoming servers for your Outlook account. It is easily fixed by double checking all Outlook settings. Be sure that you are properly connected to the internet. If everything is fine, then you probably need to check the remote server is online. From time to time, the remote server that you connect to will go down. If it is down, you can’t do much until it comes back online. At that point, all email should work fine again.
Timeout errors: Outlook has a timeout setting under the advanced settings. This timeout setting dictates how long Outlook should wait when connecting to the server. Some servers are slower than others to respond, so if Outlook has a very low timeout value, it might never properly connect. If you are experiencing timeout errors, check the value that is set. All you need to do is increase the timeout setting to see if that repairs the problem. Generally a server will respond within a few seconds. If it has extra load, the response time may be longer, so keep your timeout setting at a reasonable level to handle this.
I hope that helps fix some of your Outlook email issues. For a complete guide, have a look at the guide on fix all Outlook errors, it will solve all of your issues with Outlook.
