"Bruce Hagen" wrote;

I stand to be corrected, but you can not automatically delete message
bodies or headers with XP2. OE used to delete message bodies after the
number of days selected when it compacted in the background.

With SP2, automatic background compacting was removed due to problems it
caused. Now you will get a prompt to compact after 100 OE closings, which
you should do, and don't touch anything until it has finished. If you
compact manually, at your convenience, this will also set the counter back
to zero. See this for more information:
http://www.insideoe.com/files/maintain.htm#compact

XP2 removed the capability to do what you want. For me, I just click on
the oldest message, scroll to the newest one I want deleted and click on
it while holding down the Shift key. This will highlight the whole block
of posts and tapping the Delete key gets rid of them.
--
Bruce Hagen
MS-MVP Outlook Express
Imperial Beach, CA

Thanks for the tips, link and advice Bruce (and others in this thread), much
appreciated and I think I have a better understanding of what is going on
now.

Seems it is all to do with the automatic compacting that used to be done in
the background on 98SE whereas now it is less frequent and ideally needs to
be done by the user at regular intervals. I will see how I get on with
that - I did a compact last night and all seemed to go okay. Plus, having
the ability to delete messages is very handy!

--
Thanks again,
Louise