Outlook Troubleshooting Tips
Outlook is the most popular email client for Windows but from time to time, it faces few problems that may stop in your tracks from hassle-free emailing hours. They can be due to several reasons, like data-file corruption, damage to the profile, and so on.
Let’s take a quick look at some Outlook troubleshooting tips that can offer the solutions to the most common problems, like slow performance, constant freezing or crashing of the client, and such.
Clear/Remove Add-ons
Sometimes add-ons can be the problems. To check if that’s true, run Outlook in safe mode, which automatically disables the add-ons. Use the command outlook.exe /safe to do that. If Outlook is running fine, it is much likely that few add-ons are the culprit. Go into ‘Trust Center’ of Outlook and remove each add-on one by one to see which one is the culprit.
Use ScanPST.exe tool
Often, PST files can be corrupt or damaged, and that will cause a lot of problems for Outlook because PST are the main, native data files that store everything. If you suspect this is the issue, run the tool called ScanPSt.exe that does exactly what the name suggest. You can search for ScanPST.exe program inside your Office installation folder. Make sure the hidden files can be seen.
Archive Data Locally
Your PST can file can grow so large it may start slowing down your Outlook. The good way to deal with that is by archiving the data to locally stored PST files as a backup. Such files won’t interact with Outlook unless you import them to the main database. Therefore, you should choose your old data or the one that you don’t need right now and archive them to PST. This frees up space in your servers and significantly enhance the performance of Outlook.
Delete/Rebuild Profile Folders
A profile folder in Outlook is something that Outlook uses to remember the email accounts and settings within each account. It tells Outlook where your data is stored and all the preferences you’ve set for your email account. Deleting and re-building this profile folder can often times manage to get rid of many problems that you may be facing. To do this, open the ‘Control Panel’ –> Mail –> Profiles and delete your profile. Make sure if you are using POP account, you need to export the data before deleting the profile. And then import it back when you re-build the profile.
The above 4 methods can be used in most of the cases to get rid of the most frequent Outlook errors. If nothing else works, you can try archiving data to local PST files and re-installing Outlook completely.
If you think Outlook Windows isn’t for you and thinking of switching to other email clients in Mac, you can do so by converting PST files to the correct format. Try “PST Extractor Pro” from USL Software to do that efficiently.