Thanks for your feedback on this post. As you can see in this About.com post by Outlook guru Heinz Tschabitscher entitled “Do Outlook PST Files Have a Size Limit?”, the 2 GB limit was lifted with the introduction of Outlook 2003 (except for non-Unicode PST files), and completely with the release of Outlook 2007. I have personally used scanpst.exe to repair PST files sized between 6 and 8 GB (my archive files) in the past two weeks on both Outlook 2007 (from my production PC) and Outlook 2010 (from a test machine). And while there are other third-party tools for repairing corrupt PST files available, most of them cost upwards of $25 so I would advise trying the built-in Microsoft tool first (namely, scanpst.exe) and only resort to third-party tools if it fails to make a usable repair.

Best wishes,
–Ed–

Outlook PST files are quite vulnerable to corruption and proper care is required for managing these files. Repairing corrupt .pst file with scanpst.exe and then to perform “Compact Now” could fairly help in reducing the size of PST file, as you have explained above. But at the same time, it is also necessary to keep in mind the limitations of scanpst.exe.

To be more specific, Scanpst can not repair PST files which exceeds more than 2 GB and it can only repair the header part of .pst file, thus these facts should be considered before you use this utility. Additionally, for repairing corrupt PST file, a third party PST recovery tool could be helpful as this consist of a number of varied features to recover each object of Outlook with their entirety.

Regards
Jane