And it continues

For the record, this was how I spent most of my morning, and I’m passing this along in case you ever have to fix this.

When someone tries to send a 135MB attachment, and it gets stuck in their Outbox in Outlook, this would seem to be the best solution.

Unplug the machine from the network!!!!!! (I had him do that yesterday afternoon, in hopes that eventually Outlook would delete the file when it failed to send. I was wrong)

Shut down Outlook, and since it will probably not ever completely let go off the personal folder file, reboot the computer. (Even if Outlook does somehow complete shutting down, you’ll want a fresh restart to begin this process. )

Once the PC has rebooted, do NOT open Outlook. Go to where the .pst file is and rename it. Then open Outlook. It should prompt you to find the .pst file, allow it to create a new one instead. Once you’re there, use the Import/Export engine to import from the renamed .pst file. You’ll need to import on a folder by folder basis, obviously leaving out the Outbox folder. (Yes this does take quite a while if the original .pst file was big, which it was, of course!)

Once that is finished, you’ll probably need to restart again to completely eliminate the connection that Outlook has made to the old .pst file, with the huge attachment. Then you can delete the old .pst file and all should be well again.

Lastly, public humiliation is probably in order, to ensure that this doesn’t happen again…

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