Sadly, there are occasions when I can’t use my beloved Gmail account and have to use Outlook to connect to a corporate Exchange server. Due to Exchange’s inability to efficiently operate with large mailboxes (at least that’s what the tech support there tells me), I have to resort to moving messages to a local PST. However, some time ago I started encountering the following error whenever I tried moving messages into a PST file:
Cannot move the items. The item cannot be moved. 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 come bundled with Office (I read somewhere that such an 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 go away.
Finally, someone pointed me to the not-so-innocent registry key PSTDisableGrow, which resides in
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice14.0OutlookPST
(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, so you can once again use your PSTs.
It’s interesting to note that I found no option in the GUI that affects this registry key.
Hi – what is the name of the reg_dword value please?
Sorry – please ignore. I can see it is called “PSTDisableGrow”
Thanks for the article.