I have a user who previously was on POP and had a lot of old e-mails. Recently, she was changed over to IMAP, given a new account and e-mail address (was abc@xyz.com; now is abcde@xyz.com), and then got malware on her computer (that is where I was brought it). I backed up her files and settings with USMT, and then blew away her profile. I set her up with a new profile and copied her documents back.  I thought all of her e-mails were sync'd with IMAP (because I didn't know she was on POP previously), but she said e-mails were missing.  I went and extracted the PST file out of the USMT archive (.mig file).  Now I am trying to open the PST with all of her old e-mails.

When I opened the PST in Outlook, it immediately came up and said, "SYNCHRONIZING" and was synchronizing a whole lot of stuff.  Then I started getting messages from the IMAP server saying "e-mail too large.  Please limit to 20MB."  I don't know if it's talking about an individual e-mail that has a big attachment, or the entire mailbox. 

What I would like to do is give the user access to her old e-mails without synchronizing those with the IMAP server.  Is there a way to do that?

Thanks.

Hi,

How did you open the PST file in Outlook? Did you open it via File > Open & Export > Open Outlook Data File?

In theory, A Personal Folders file (.pst) is an Outlook data file that stores your messages and other items on your computer. It doesn't sync to the mail server.

Please first make a backup copy of the PST file, then, we may try changing Outlook to Work Offline mode under Send/Receive tab and then open the PST file. After that, we can create a new empty PST file and then drag all items from the opened PST file to the newly created PST file to see if this issue continues.

Basically, the 20MB limit is for individual email of an IMAP account. If there are indeed some large emails, we can use the following method to find them out:

1. Start Outlook and switch to Work Offline mode.

2. Open the PST file you extracted via File > Open & Export > Open Outlook Data File.

3. Press Ctrl + Shift + F to open Advanced Find.

4. In Advanced Find, click Browse button and select the PST file from the folders list. Also make sure you select all folders and subfolders of the PST file.

5. On the More Choices tab, click the box labelled Only items with one or more attachments. Do not click or add anything else.

6. Click Find Now button.

7. When all the emails have been displayed, click the Size column to sort the searching results by SIZE. Check if there are any emails that show up with a size of 0 (zero). These emails will likely have attachments that add up to over 20MB. Delete them, and then delete them again from the trash bin.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Steve Fan
TechNet Community Support