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Microsoft Outlook cannot send receive error 0x8004060C

Computer Aid Posted on by

A customer suddenly found that her outlook stopped sending and receiving emails.

At first, she thought that she had received a power surge, but after switching everything off, then on, emails were still not working.

I had a look, and noticed that outlook was generating error 0x8004060C

It didn’t take me long to find out that this was due to the outlook database file was “full”.

Technically:

All emails and attachments in outlook are stored in a big database file called outlook.pst

All outlook PST files cannot be bigger than 2GB, and in this case, it had reached this limit.

Once this happens, outlook starts to behave in all sorts of strange ways.

The solution is reasonably simple, but can take quite some time.

First, make sure outlook has an archive folder/account. If not, create a new archive folder. (file -> data file management -> .pst -> ok -> give it a reasonable name like “archive-2009”)

Note that you can create as many archive folders as you like.

Within the archive folder, I create sub-folders to reflect the main folders that I want to archive (eg inbox and sent items)

Next, I highlight the emails that I want to archive.

If most of the emails are in the inbox, and/or sent items, then sort all emails into date order, and then highlight all emails that are, say, older than 6 months. Use click, then shift-click to quickly highlight large numbers of emails.

Then, drag-drop the highlighted emails into their appropriate folder in the archive. This should remove the emails from the main account.

Once all the inbox and sent items (and anything else) is moved to the archive folder, then you need to compact the main database (it will not compact automatically, so you must do this step before you can send/receive emails again)

file -> data file management -> select the main .pst file (usually outlook.pst) -> settings -> general -> compact now

Compacting can take anywhere between a few minutes and a few hours, so be sure to allow it to complete.

Once this is done, the main database should be much smaller & restarting the PC is a good way to be sure that outlook re-reads the new, compacted database.

Comments

Microsoft Outlook cannot send receive error 0x8004060C — 2 Comments

  1. The customer was lucky the database did not get corrupt.

    The reason many PST files are limited to 2GB is because that was the limit in Office 2000, Office 2003 and newer allow larger PST files.

    This can cause problems with even newer versions of Outlook because the database design doesn’t automatically change when MS-Office is upgraded.

    A good way to fix this is to create a new PST with the higher limit, and make that the primary drop point for all new mail.

    Make sure to move contacts and calendar entries to the new database.

    Of course this will also lead to larger databases 🙂 yesterday I had a customer with a 5GB PST as his primary mail database.

    As I was writing this, I just learned that Outlook 2003 creates/supports up to 20GB PST files (eek!)

  2. Hi,

    Thanks for sharing this wonderful post. Few days back, I got the same error and was not able to work on my outlook. Then someone recommended me about Stellar Phoenix Compact PST software. I used this pst compact tool and now outlook is working perfectly fine.

    Regards

    Jane

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