Can I increase hard drive space by deleting Outlook emails?

My Outlook PST file has gotten quite large and I'd like to go through and delete large chunks of email I don't need/want anymore. The hope is that this would free up some hard drive space. Is there a particular way to do this, or is simply deleting emails the way to go? I've deleted a good number of large ones so far and my PST file has actually INCREASED in size by a couple hundred MB.....so I thought I'd see if anyone could advise.

Also....do I need to run, like, a disk defragmenter afterwards? Or is this automatically done by computers from time to time? Or......?

Thanks for any tips.

I am under the impression that Outlook, and Outlook Express, are alloted a chunk of space that can't be exceeded by them, or used by another program.

I remember having a similar issue on my old computer at work and I think my boss "compressed" it after deleting the old emails. I'm not sure thats the right word for it.

**I'm also the last person to take computer advice from. **

Yes, the emails can be compacted, but that only makes space for more emails.

:haha:

You could create a separate PST file called "eMails_2009", move all eMails from the year 2009 in it, delete them from your standard PST file and then compact it.

I do this with mails coming from technical mailing lists. I use that as a reference to find if someone using the same programming language encounterd the problem I am facing.