Annoying Outlook Error

Sadly, there are occasions where I can’t use my beloved Gmail account and have to use Outlook to connected to a corporate Exchange servers. Due to Exchange inability to efficiently operate with large mailboxes (at least that what the tech support there tells me), I have to resort to so move messages to a local PST. However, some time a go I’ve started encountering the following error whenever I’ve tried moving messages into a PST file:

Cannot move the items. The item cannot be move. It was either already moved or deleted, or access was denied.

I’ve tried changing permissions, moving my PST around, repairing it with some tools that comes bundled with Office (I read somewhere that such error can be caused by corrupted PST files), and even tried creating a new PST. But, alas, the not so helpful message just wouldn’t get a way.

Finally someone pointed me the not so innocent registry key PSTDisableGrow which resides in

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\PST

(or 12.0 if you have Outlook 2007 instead of 2010). Apparently when this REG_DWORD is set to 1, it only enables you to read and delete messages from your PST. By setting it to 0, the above unhelpful error message goes away to you can once again use you PSTs.

It’s interesting to note, that I found no option in the GUI that affects this registry key.

2 thoughts on “Annoying Outlook Error”

  1. Sorry – please ignore. I can see it is called “PSTDisableGrow”

    Thanks for the article.

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