Jim Guckin

If like me, you downloaded the 2010 Office Beta, you may be  interested to know there is already a path out for the Outlook 2010 portion.  Now Microsoft releasing Patches is nothing new, and I think it’s funny to release a patch for the product prior to it coming out, but that’s exactly what the Beta process is for.  Apparently Outlook 2010 Beta has a problem where it creates unusually large e-mail files that take up a ton of space.  The Outlook product team offered a bug fix for both the 32-bit and 64-bit systems that fixes the problem going forward, yet if you already experienced the problem you’re stuck with it, as the patch only works going forward and doesn’t fix the current issue. This could be a problem if you use an e-mail system that limits its message sizes, like Gmail or BlackBerry.  The bug appears when you use numbered and bullet point lists in a message, this causes a cascading style sheet (CSS) definitions to be added redundantly in each outgoing message, Microsoft says. Once you restart Outlook after you download the patch will remove the extra CSS files from outgoing messages.   “If you use number and bullet lists, close Outlook at the end of each day, and your new outgoing messages will return to their normal size,” wrote Jenny Liu, Outlook Program Manager, in a blog post.
Now to get rid of those huge e-mails, the Outlook team suggests running Conversation Cleanup, which is a new feature in the Outlook 2010, which moves all the older, redundant messages in the user’s e-mail conversations to the Deleted Items folder. Cleanup keeps the most recent message around, Microsoft says, ensuring users have all the content in the conversation while allowing them to delete the redundant messages.

Outlook 2010 Beta Patch

Download Outlook 2010 Beta fix for 32-bit Office 2010
Download Outlook 2010 Beta fix for 64-bit Office 2010