Sorry everyone, stepped offline for a while.

morganlefay: Sorry for confusion...I'm NOT talking about AutoArchive but rather the automatic compacting of "white space" in Outlook PST file.

This is a standalone home Outlook install which pulls down mail from POP server.

Originally posted here by nihil
Are you sure that Outlook 2002 actually has an autocompact feature.
Nihil: I'm not totally sure it does have one but this MS article and some other articles (dont have them handy) mentioned it. http://support.microsoft.com/default...NoWebContent=1.
Automatic compaction takes place as an idle task in the background. The following conditions must be true for this background task to take place:
* Outlook must be running.
-and-
*The computer must not be engaged in other CPU-intensive tasks such as copying or downloading files.
It also mentions that the file had to be a min of 16KB in size and there was at least 16KB of "white space" available. Not a problem, the PST I'm talking about is 40MB+.

So that would lend me to believe it does auto compact...sigh not clear! I hope it's not automatic, obviously. I guess I need to test it by creating a new PST, moving a bunch of messages into it, delete some, and then wait to see if it auto compacts. I was hoping to avoid this process and not sure if I'll test it properly.

/EDIT:
Another article that talks about the auto compacting feature.
http://www.winnetmag.com/Article/ArticleID/22164/22164.html
Outlook automatically compacts a .pst file when the file reaches a certain (but undocumented) size; however, for automatic compaction to occur, your PC must be completely idle.