Cannot see the contents of a pst

[Andy542]

One of my users - a top brass guy - has a pst of about 1GB. This pst contains two folders - Old Sent Items (about 500MB) and Old Inbox Items (about 600 MB). Since last week, he is able to see the mails in (contents of) the Old Sent Items, but when he click on the Old Inbox items, it tells him that there is nothing to display. I have tried removing the pst and adding it back, I got the same results. If you check on the properties of both there seems to be nothing unusual. I can't say he deleted the mail because the size is that big.
Anybody with any idea what caused this and it's remedy! He is screaming murder that there are some mails he needs to access urgently.

Regards,
Andy

 

[brontosaurus]

Just to make this clear, when you click on Old Inbox, do you get "there are no items to show in this view", or "unable to display the folder"?
Did you check the Deleted Items folder in the PST? Did you try to run a SCANPST?

 

[Tech1Man]

The pst file maybe too big although Microsoft does accept that pst files over 2GB are more likely to become corrupt. The best idea would be use the inbox repair tool first. If that does not work then you can email Microsoft. They will email you a pst splitter program which splits your pst so that it can be easily read in outlook.

 

[jpaf]

PST properties can be deceptive. When I have previously split large pst files into smaller ones by moving\deleting messages the original pst size does not change. So he may have deleted the messages but the file size has remained the same. Do you have a backup of the pst before the problem occurred?

Regards
jpaf

 

[Andy542]

Thanks guys for your help. I hadn't thought of this before. The user had applied a filter that was to show only unread messages and since there were no unread messages in this folder none was being shown.

Andy