Outlook Tips & Techniques: Deleting Offitems.log and Outitems.log Files

Some of my users have offitems.log and outitems.log files in their Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook folder. Can I safely delete these log files?

Don't be hasty about deleting those files. Both are important to Outlook's automatic journaling feature. Offitems.log contains information about Office documents that the user created while Outlook wasn't running. The next time Outlook starts, it reads that file and creates corresponding entries in the user's Journal folder. Similarly, outitems.log contains information about Outlook items and tasks. Unlike many other log files that you can easily read in Notepad, these files contain binary data.

The locations for these files are stored in string values named Item Log File and Outlook Item Log File, respectively, in the Windows registry under the HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice10.0OutlookJournal subkey. (In the subkey path, change 10.0 to 11.0 for Outlook 2003; change 10.0 to 9.0 for Outlook 2000.)