Deleting Emails in Outlook Express

[JohnE]

This morning I was down to about 1Gb of disk space remaining on my 38GB hard drive - so I decided that it was time to get rid of some old emails. I often send people very large files by email, so I knew they'd be taking up a large amount of space.

I managed to locate all the emails I wanted to delete. Slowly but surely I've been dragging them into the 'Deleted Items' folder in Outlook Express.

But here's the bad news.... I right-click on the 'Deleted Items' folder and I click the option to empty it. The usual message appears (Are you sure you want to permanently deete the contens of the 'Deleted Items' folder?). I click 'YES'.... but my available disk space then goes DOWN instead of up. After deleting 1,000 or so emails, I'm now reduced to only 190Mb of disk space. The emails appear to have gone (i.e. they don't show up anywhere within Outlook Express - nor are they sitting in my Recycle Bin). So why don't I get the disk space back???

My 'Sent Items' folder (i.e. the one I was deleting everything from) is still exactly the same size as it was before I started. But in addition, I now seem to have a big file on my drive called 'Deleted Items.dbx' It's 780Mb - and yet the 'Deleted Items' folder is completely empty. Does this make sense to anyone??

Do I need to compact the folders somehow?