Microsoft Outlook (MS Outlook) is a desktop-based application, developed by Microsoft in 1996, providing email facility to clients with an additional feature of personal information management. Since its introduction, many versions have been developed and latest updated version is Outlook 2016. MS Outlook stores the account data in the form of PST File (i.e., Personal Storage Table File) with an extension of .pst, which is a binary type file and stores entire Outlook data like emails, contacts, calendars, etc.
Sometimes, Microsoft Outlook may consist of some emails which when accessed, may crash Outlook. These mails actually are emails that have gone corrupted. Major problem with such mails is that user cannot delete such message, because as soon as these mails are accessed, Outlook crashes instantly.
Outlook crashes lead to very frustrating situation, because the problem usually occurs randomly and sometimes it gets difficult to determine the cause of the crash. Microsoft Outlook crashes due to following causes:
Following are the reasons for the cause:
To deal with such problem, users can to delete the corrupted message without crashing MS Outlook by disabling the reading pane in Outlook. There are different conditions for this:
Condition 1: When MS Outlook Cannot Open
To work around with this issue, Open MS Outlook in Safe Mode because this will enable users to disable the Reading Pane. The procedure to open Reading pane varies according to the Windows version that is being currently used:
Condition 2: When MS Outlook Can Open
In such condition, open Outlook and then perform following steps:
Conclusion: Even after performing the above-mentioned procedures, if MS Outlook still crashes upon selecting such emails, then it means that the PST file of Outlook is damaged. To recover data from such corrupt PST files, users are advised to use MS Outlook's inbuilt tool called SCANPST.exe or a third party application.