Storing Outlook Items in Access

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Is it practical to store all Outlook items (appointments, tasks, emails, notes) in Access database for rapid search and retrieval?

Armstrong

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Outlook itself has various search options (simple and advanced).

Importing all Outlook items into Access seems overkill to me. If you wish, you can link Outlook folders into an Access database (File | Get External Data | Link Tables…)

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Outlook itself has various search options (simple and advanced).

Importing all Outlook items into Access seems overkill to me. If you wish, you can link Outlook folders into an Access database (File | Get External Data | Link Tables…)

The idea stems from enormous number of Outlook items being kept in the PST. It’s extremely sluggish to retrieve records. Even switching folders, say from email to appointment, would take over 3 seconds. Perhaps, Access may be a solution to manage a huge number of Outlook items.
I wonder if any members of Woody’s Lounge actively use Access to manage Outlook items.
Armstrong

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It depends on what you want to do with the items. If you import Outlook items into Access, not all properties will be imported, so you’ll miss some information in Access.
Also, an Access database has a maximum size of 2 GB, while an Outlook .pst file in Unicode format can be up to 20 GB, so if you have a very large .pst file, you may have problems importing everything into Access.
You may be better off archiving some of the items to a separate .pst file.

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