Just a quick one as a reminder as it caught me out!

You’re probably aware that Outlook stores the names that appear when you type a mail recipient in an .NK2 file.

In the past when moving a user between PCs all we needed to do with grab the .NK2 file from the old PC and copy it to the new PC.

Turns out Outlook 2010 doesn’t use an NK2 file anymore!

If you’re using Outlook 2010 look at your contacts folders. You should see a folder called “Suggested Contacts”

This where the names are now stored.

The idea is that you can easily manage them and more importantly because the names are stored in your mailbox they will follow you around on different PCs.

So the main thing is how do you transfer them across from an old PC running an older version of Outlook?

There is a Microsoft Knowledgebase article detailing the whole thing here.

Simply put,

Outlook has a command line flag “/importNK2”.

Grab the NK2 file on the old PC from one of the following locations.

• Windows XP
  Drive:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
• Windows Vista and later versions
  Drive:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Outlook

Browse to the folder “%appdata%\Microsoft\Outlook”

Make sure the NK2 file is in that folder and the filename matches your Outlook profile name.

e.g Andy.NK2

Run Outlook with the switc

Outlook.exe /importNK2

Done!

The KB article says that the import process renames the file with a .file extension but this didn’t seem to happen when I did it. (though it might have just been me!)

Note if you perform an upgrade from an old version of Outlook to Outlook 2010 this should have been done for you automatically

I just wanted to relay a support call I’ve just dealt with as it really had me stumped. For a while I was concerned there was something really bad happening but now that I’ve gotten to the bottom of it I can breathe easy as it wasn’t actually all that serious

Our client called to say that she was expecting an e-mail from their German contractor and it hadn’t arrived. He’d resent it a couple of times to confirm he’d got the email address, etc correct

I logged onto the server and used Exchange message tracking to see if the e-mail had arrived

The message did arrive at the server as expected

My next port of call was to logon to the PC and check Outlook, sometimes I’ve seen similar cases where a filter has been applied by mistake that means the user has “lost” the message. Unfortunately this drew a blank as well

I used the advanced find feature to display all emails that had been delivered today and I even created a search folder to do the same thing but the message was nowhere to be seen

I logged in via Outlook Web Access to see if the message was visible there as I’ve also seen cases where the message is corrupt and Outlook can’t display the message but OWA seems to do ok with it. Again no luck here

So I checked to see if she hadn’t deleted the message by mistake. The message wasn’t in there but when I used the “Recover Deleted Items” feature in Outlook there is was! I thought this would be a simple matter of clicking the message and pressing restore……unfortunately not

After I clicked restore I expected the message to reappear in the Inbox but after waiting a few minutes, nothing

Confused I went back into the dialog in case I’d selected the wrong message. The message was still available for restore so I clicked it again. Once again the message failed to reappear so I went back in again

One of the columns is “Deleted On”, I noticed that time was only a minute ago

I recovered the item again, noted the time, waited a minute and went back in and lo and behold the deleted on time had changed to the time just after I’d recovered the item

Confused I turned to the server, this particular server uses McAfee GroupShield for checking inbound messages for malware so I trawled through the logs to see if it was picking this up as a dodgy message. I wasn’t holding my breath though as this isn’t how GroupShield works (the message is usually quarantined or a part of it replaced and the user alerted). As expected this was a dead end

I was starting to get a little paranoid now so checked the PC over for malware and my initial checks didn’t turn anything up. I even used SysInternals Process Monitor to track what was going on during the recovery to see if there was an outside process doing something but again this didn’t show anything of use

I fired up Outlook in safe mode but didn’t get very far as the recover items feature is an add-in itself!

I decided to keep my attentions on Outlook and created a new profile for the user. This time I disabled Outlook cache mode and recovered the item again

This time the message reappeared as expected!!

As soon as this happened a huge light bulb came on somewhere in the back of my head

There is a feature in Outlook that will ONLY work when cache mode is enabled

Outlook Junk Filter

I went into the options for this it hit me straight in the face!

This is how the junk filter was configured on the PC

Can you see the problem?

Only allow from safe lists and permanently delete suspect messages!!!

I’m surprised she gets any email at all! But if she only receives messages from a group of people that she always emails then they would be on her safe list

The junk filter checks for messages as soon as they arrive in the inbox, irrespective of whether that is because the message is an incoming e-mail or has just appeared there after being restored

I have no idea why this has changed. It must have only have changed recently because as I said earlier the configuration would surely mean she would notice lots of emails going missing.

Once I turned off the junk mail filter I was able to recover the message ok

Ordinarily when a client doesn’t require the Outlook junk filter because they are getting their spam filtered elsewhere I use the Office ADM files and setup group policy to explicitly disable the Outlook filter (Office 2007 version here) so I need to go and set this up I think!

Minor panic over!

I had an e-mail conversation with a client this week who uses Exchange public folders to share contacts. He initially was planning on creating sub-folders to group the contacts(suppliers, customers, etc)

I suggested he used categories as it would mean it was still one place to go for their contacts but they could use a view to group them as needed

I know this is SharePoint territory…but until they made the move to Office 2007 the inability to edit directly in Outlook wasn’t desirable for them. They now have Outlook 2007 and plans are underway to get them onto WSS 3.0…I digress

So he went away and created lots of categories and emailed me back to say no-one else could see his newly created categories.

This is normal behaviour, Outlook 2007 now stores categories directly in the mailbox as opposed to the registry in older versions of office

So back to the public folder as this doesn’t help solve the problem!

However, he can still categorise the contacts as the item category is totally separate from the users list of categories

e.g If I categorise a contact as “SUPPLIER” and someone else in the office then opens the contact it will still be marked as supplier even if he doesn’t have that category setup on his system.

Fine.

But what if we need to standardise on a set of categories? Without having to re-type all the custom categories this is the solution I came up with

Create a dummy contact (call it anything you like) in the public folder

Categorise it with all the categories you need to copy

The on the PC you want to copy the categories to do the following

Open the item, click CATEGORIZE, then ALL CATEGORIES and you’ll get a screen similar to the following

It shows the categories not on your list as “(not in Master Category list)”

Highlight one of them and click the NEW button to get this screen

The name has been pre-populated.

Just click OK to get the category saved

The only thing this won’t do is bring the colours across but in terms of grouping/viewing the colours are partly irrelevant

Repeat with other categories until your done. Not the most elegant solution but much quicker than typing them all out

If anyone knows of an easier way I’d love to hear from you!

Got a call from a client today

He was making some changes to the contact details on his website and when clicked on one of the email addresses in the page he got the following error message

“Could not perform this operation because the default mail client is not properly installed”

Bit odd. He is using Outlook 2003 and that appeared to working ok

A quick google search came up a with knowledge base article that says if your using Outlook Express as your mail client and you click a mailto link that contains more than 456 characters you will get this error.

Neither of these things were true though

I had another look around a notice that when he clicked on his start menu the usual Outlook 2003 orange icon was missing and had been replaced with an email envelope icon. When i clicked it the “Internet Properties” dialog box was displayed

I checked Outlook was set as the default program in Internet Explorer and via the options in Outlook. I also checked in “set program access and defaults” and Outlook Express wasn’t selected

I switched the defaults between Outlook and Outlook Express (and back again) and the error message went away. However, the new email was created in Outlook express and i couldn’t get it to do it Outlook

I decided the best thing to do was a “Detect and repair” in Outlook

This sorted out the icon problem but i still couldn’t get Outlook to open the mailto link

So,off to the registry!

Located the following

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\mailto\shell\open\command

It was pointing at outlook express!

I changed it to this: (which i double checked against my laptop)

“%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Office11\outlook.exe” -c IPM.Note /m “%1%”

Notice the quote locations…they are important!

Restarted Outlook and all was well

After my post last week about problems with the Outlook Connector it appears to have all been fixed!

I checked my mail this morning and it had sync’d correctly. I took another look at the Outlook blog and there are lots of reports of the issue now being resolved
The comment from the Outlook Program Manager (Jared Brown) reads 

Hi Everyone,

We have fixed the issue that was causing sync errors with custom domain accounts. You may need to reboot Outlook for our fix to take effect.

Thanks for your patience,

Jared Brown, Outlook Program Manager

I haven’t made any changes to the software so the problem must have been “in the cloud”

Just glad it’s sorted now!

I posted a little while back about the very cool Outlook Connector that lets you access a hotmail account within Outlook

All in all i’ve been pretty pleased with it. I read somewhere recently it was no longer a beta so planned to upgrade to the “proper” version

A couple of days ago i opened Outlook and was prompted to upgrade the outlook connector. So i allowed the installer to do it’s thing but since then the connector hasn’t worked at all and from the comments on the Outlook team blog i’m not alone

The error i initally had told me it was unable to sign in and in the log it simply said “Network operation failed”

I thought it wouldn’t hurt to remove the account from Outlook and re-add it. Still doesn’t work but now i’m getting an extra message

A pop-up told me that the feature was only available to subscribers (and even asked me if i’d like to subscribe now) and the log pretty much says the same thing

Outlook Connector Version 12.0.4518.1063

Account: ******YEAH RIGHT!!**************

Signed in successfully at 28/09/2007 14:15:18                                                                          

Mail: Error at 14:16.                                                                                                 �
Calendar: Error at 14:15.                                                                                             �
Contacts: Last successfully refreshed at 14:16.                                                                        

Errors :

Time: 28/09/2007 14:15:21
Error in Mail
Network operation failed
Time: 28/09/2007 14:15:23
Error in Mail
Outlook Connector is available only to subscribers.
Time: 28/09/2007 14:15:24
Error in Calendar
Outlook Connector is available only to subscribers.
Time: 28/09/2007 14:15:45
Error in Mail
Outlook Connector is available only to subscribers.
Time: 28/09/2007 14:15:49
Error in Mail
Outlook Connector is available only to subscribers.
Time: 28/09/2007 14:16:03
Error in Mail
Outlook Connector is available only to subscribers

I hate bitching about software that has been given to me for free but it is a little frustrating when the beta worked without issue

I’ll keep playing with it but i think i’ll be waiting for a fix from the Outlook connector guys

I got a call today where one of our clients was unable to open Outlook (2003)

She would open it and get the standard “we’re sorry but Outlook needs to close” error. She would restart and unless she went into safe mode it would just keep doing the same thing

The event log entry basically said “faulting module outllib.dll” (not very helpful!)

The first thing i thought was that there was an add-in or something preventing it from loading so i disabled all of them via safe mode….no good

So i used some of the Outlook 2003 switches such as /cleanviews /cleanprofile (full list here)….still nothing

I created a new profile and it still crashed, before it asked for the profile. I then used the “create item switches” (e.g /c ipm.note) which worked fine which got me thinking it must be something to do with the “user interface” as it crashed before it really got anywhere during the load (my hunch would prove to be correct)

I then logged in as a different user and this worked fine so it must be something user specific

I opened the “C:\Documents and Settings\- YOUR USER-\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook” folder and basically moved all the files out.

Outlook opened fine!!

After a bit of trial and error i found out it was the Outcmd.dat file causing the problem. This file stores all your toolbar customisation settings. If you delete (or rename) this file a new one gets created and your problem is sorted

Just as a note, the switch /nocustomize would have spotted this for me…..

I got sent an email today with a PDF attached to it.

Since i’m using Outlook 2007 i did what i normally do and click on the message to preview it. Then i forget i never got around to installing a PDF preview handler so open it up in Acrobat

But today something was different. When i clicked on the message there was a “preview file” button. I clicked it and lo and behold PDF preview in the email! I tried it using Explorer and it works as well

I did a bit of digging and it turns out the Acrobat 8.1 update included a PDF handler

I’m suprised i hadn’t spotted it sooner but there you go!

We recently did some data reorganising at one of client sites

The idea was to make the folder structure reflect the current organision (some departments had been merged, made redundant,etc), setup new permissions and setup new network drives for easy access

One of the users reported that he didn’t want drive X: to disappear as his Outlook PST wouldn’t work

!!!!

We all know that PSTs on your file servers are bad but users always ask “why?” so i thought i’d see if i could come up with some official reference to point him at

First up, the official line is in the guise of a Microsoft KB article

PSTs stored on the LAN (or WAN) have been officially unsupported since Exchange 4

I also found an entry on the Enterprise Platforms Support Windows Server Performance team blog (or Ask the the performance team which is easier!) which shows off a so real world information which you don’t always get with a KB article and goes into a bit details as to why PST have such an impact on performance

After speaking to the client he wanted to use PST files so that he could archive any old messages to keep them away from his Mailbox (storage limits in place) but still have access to them on a daily basis

He is going to create the PST file on his local drive but use the Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders Backup tool (more info here so that he can get them covered by the file server backup. I haven’t used the tool before so if there is anything weird or wonderful i’ll post about it

Found this on the Microsoft download site

Microsoft Office Outlook Connector

If your using Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 then you can connect to your Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) account via Outlook.

This was something i used to do years ago with Outlook Express but the functionality was disabled after account misuse. If you had a paid for account you could still do it but i didn’t think it was worth the cash

According to the download page you can do the following

Outlook Connector Beta enables you to use your Live Hotmail accounts within Outlook:

• Read and send your Office Live Mail/Windows Live Hotmail e-mail messages.
• Manage your Live Mail Contacts.
• Use advanced options for blocking junk e-mail messages.
• Manage multiple e-mail accounts in one place.

With a paid subscription, Outlook Connector Beta enables these additional features:

• Manage, share, and synchronize your Windows Live Calendar in Outlook.
• Access your Tasks and Notes.

I’ve just installed it and adds your live mail as another mailbox in Outlook. It then does a send/receive and it just looks like normal Outlook email. This is going to be a big time saver for me. I love having web accounts i can access anywhere but i hate having to go check my hotmail. For my gmail acccount i have a Vista sidebar gadget that tells me when i have new mail and my exchange/pop3 accounts are setup in Outlook so Hotmail was the missing piece.

Go check it out!