asked on

User's To-Do list and tasks do not include items from new PST in Outlook 2016.

One of our users who is running Outlook 2016 uses Search Folders to create Tasks and To-Do lists from emails flagged for followup. He has Outlook rules which move messages from his inbox to a Personal Folder stored on his laptop. This is a faculty member and MD who gets a lot of email and needs this system to organize his time and make sure he completes action items based on emails he receives from scientific collaborators and others.

Last week he sent our team a ticket saying he is seeing this error message "The Outlook data file C:\Users\johndoe\Documents\Outlook Files\Personal.pst has reached the mazimum size. To reduce the amount of data in this file, permanently delete some items that you no longer need." The file size was 37GB. He said he could not delete anything as it would not let him do anything with the file. I talked him through running scanpst.exe on it, which repaired it. Then he made a second PST file and moved some messages there.

But he reports that now items are not being created in his To-Do lists and Tasks from messages in the new Personal Folders file. He said something like this happened before and a former tech on our team who has left the company was able to somehow reset the Tasks to fix the issue.

Does anyone know how to do this or fix the issue so that To-Do and Task items are created from both .pst files?

Thanks,
Don

Adam the 32-bit Aardvark

First thing I would do is going to the user's Account settings > Data files and making sure both PST files are listed there. If they are, I'd check if recreating his Outlook profile helps. It might be what he meant by "resetting tasks."
The most unfortunate fact is that PST files are a pain. They are prone to corruption and it gets even worse when they grow in size... They can do fine when they are not too large, but that would require the user to archive some of the content. The real solution would be to change the workflow to the one not requiring PST files.

Member_2_79173

ASKER

Both PST files are listed. I posted this question on the Microsoft Technet forums and the solution was to check the box "Display reminders and tasks from this folder in the To-Do Bar" as shown in the attachment.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Member_2_79173

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial