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Archive for Outlook

Two Real Time Savers with Outlook 2016

by KW · Comments (0)
Feb 11 2016

I’ve been using Office 2016 now for quite awhile, and nearly every day I find myself nodding my head in agreement with two new features in Outlook 2016 that are real time savers for me:

  • Outlook automatically detects if I was supposed to attach a file to the email, but clicked Send without doing so. It then prompts me with a nice reminder. That has saved me multiple times from sending an email without the attachment!
  • Then, when I go to attach a file, Outlook now presents me with a list of recent files that I have accessed or created. No more drilling down through directories for the PDF file I just created and wish to attach. This is a huge time saver for me.

Here are screen shots of these features in action:

Step 1: Create an email and make a reference to an attachment, like this:

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Step 2: Click Send without attaching a file, and you’ll get the following notification window:

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Step 3: Click on Insert –> Attach File and Outlook will display a list of recent files:

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Categories : Office, Office 2016, Tools
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KB3114409 May Affect Outlook 2010 Settings

by KW · Comments (0)
Dec 08 2015

There are some reports that an Outlook 2010 update that was released today (KB3114409 Dec 8, 2015) may impact operations of Outlook 2010. You may find that it will only run in safe modem, or your Outlook settings may get reset to default, or configuration changes you make will not stick.

If so, uninstall KB3114409 for now. Read more here

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Categories : Office, Outlook, Windows, Windows 10
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Outlook Crashing after Latest Updates–KB3097877

by KW · Comments (0)
Nov 11 2015

I am seeing many reports today of Outlook crashing after the recent set of Office 2010 updates, as well as getting a blank screen after pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL for the login screen.

It appears that KB 3097877 may be the cause. If so you can try uninstalling that KB patch.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3097877

There is also a suggestion to clear the Java cache. Instructions can be found here:

http://www.java.com/en/download/help/plugin_cache.xml

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Categories : News, Office, Outlook, Tools
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Tool to Analyze Message Headers

by KW · Comments (0)
Sep 16 2014

Microsoft’s Remote Connectivity Analyzer is a great resource tool for testing and running diagnostics against Exchange, ActiveSync, OWA, POP3/IMAP, Lync, and Office 365. It also includes Message Analyzer, which is an SMTP header analysis tool and makes reading email headers less painful.

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Microsoft’s Exchange Team has a good blog post on how to use the Message Analyzer feature.

For grins and giggles, I sent myself and email from my Gmail account to my business email account, and then processed the message header through the Message Analyzer.

  1. Open up the Message Analyzer tab of Microsoft’s Remote Connectivity Analyzer in a browser window.
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  2. Open up your email client and access/view the message header. Select and copy the complete contents of the message header.
    I have a separate post that explains how to view email message headers from Outlook 2010/2013.
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  3. Flip back to your browser, and paste the message header into the Message Header Analyzer area.
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  4. Click Analyze Header and you will get a Summary report, plus a list of Received Headers and other headers.
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Categories : Email, Exchange, Outlook, Windows
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View Message Headers in Outlook 2010 and 2013

by KW · Comments (0)
Sep 16 2014

I’m often asking customers to send me the message headers of an email when diagnosing an email issue. With Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013, the ability to quickly display the message headers is no longer there, by default. But, we can quickly add it to Outlook’s Quick Access Toolbar. Once we are done, viewing message headers in the future will be a “one click” process.

So, let’s get to work!

  1. Open up Outlook, and look at the top left where you will find one or more icons.
    Click on the drop down arrow to open up the Customize Quick Access Toolbar menu
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  2. Click to select More Commands
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  3. Click the dropdown arrow in the Choose Commands From area, and then select All Commands
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  4. Now scroll through the list of commands, select Message Options, then click Add
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  5. Click OK to finish. You will now see a new icon for added to the Quick Access Toolbar.
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To view message headers, select a message and then click on the Message Options button from the toolbar!

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Categories : Essentials, Outlook, Tools
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Moving multiple folders in Outlook 2013

by KW · Comments (0)
May 06 2014

I was doing a recent migration of email from Windows Live Mail (WLM) to Outlook 2013. The built in transfer within WLM worked perfectly in moving folders over to Outlook with one exception. This customer has two mail accounts created in Outlook, and the folders being transferred over from WLM needed to go into the second (non-default) email account.

No problem, I thought. I’ll transfer them over to Outlook, and then drag and drop the folders from the default mail account to the second mail account.

But Outlook does not support selecting and moving multiple folders, and this customer had several dozen mail folders to be moved. I wanted to see if there was a workaround or a fix for moving multiple folders within Outlook, and I found Pandali Folder Master for Outlook utility.

I ran this on the customer’s Windows 8.1 laptop, and quickly moved the folders to the proper account.

In summary, I was very surprised that the WLM to Outlook transfer worked without a hitch, and that this utility program took care of getting multiple folbers moved to the right email account.

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Categories : Email, Office 2013, Outlook, Tools
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Outlook 2010 displays Autodiscover Security Certificate Alert window at startup

by KW · Comments (0)
Mar 06 2014

I had a customer with an SBS 2008 server who called this past week to say that they were getting the following popup alert when starting up Outlook 2010:

The name on the security certificate is invalid or does not match the name of the site

SNAGHTML17ae3bd2

I ran the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer to test Autodiscover for this customer. And sure enough, it was failing the test to validate the server name.

Certificate name validation failed. Host name xxx.com doesn’t match any name found on the server certificate.

The first article I reviewed was KB 940726. Although the title of this KB article indicates that it was written for Outlook 2007 and Exchange 2007, it is also applicable to Outlook 2010 and Exchange 2010. It covers how to change the internal URL for the Autodiscover service stored inside Exchange via Exchange PowerShell commands.

However, in my case, the PowerShell command get-ClientAccessServer | fl was showing that the AutoDiscoverServiceInternalUri field was showing the correct URL.

SNAGHTML17bae007

In talking with other MVPs, it appears that the issue may have to do with someone making changes to the domain name “A” or “cName”. I am still tracking that down.

But meanwhile, I was looking for a quick solution to at least suppress those popup alerts on a short-term basis, as I was going to be traveling for the next several days.

More research lead me to this blog post from Tipst3r titled: “Turn off Autodiscover for Outlook”, which was a recommendation for adding a registry key called “Exclude ScpLookup”. I gave it a try, but it did not appear to work. Also, I wanted more information as to what this registry key did, and why.

So, on further searching, I found Microsoft’s KB 2212902 titled: “Unexpected Autodiscover behavior when you have registry settings under the \Autodiscover key”. This article listed seven different optional registry settings that one might create and use.

I started working with these options, and found that using the following three options (setting them to a value of “1”) would disable the “security certificate is invalid or does not match” popup window from appearing:

  • ExcludeScpLookup
  • ExcludeHttpsAutoDiscoverDomain
  • ExcludeSrvRecord

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I’m not one to generally implement a workaround. So part of this was just a desire to understand more what was going on “under the covers”, so to speak. I will be testing out making the recommended changes to the domain records later, but since I will be gone for a week, I did not want to make such changes at this time.

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Categories : Exchange, Outlook, SBS
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Fix Sluggish Outlook 2013

by KW · Comments (0)
Aug 26 2013

I finally made the jump from Outlook 2010 to Outlook 2013 last week on my primary work desk computer. There are many things that I really like about Outlook 2013, which I will put in a separate blog post.

But almost immediately on using it, Outlook 2013 appeared to be “sluggish” (is that a technical term?) compared to Outlook 2010. No hard facts, just end user observation. Switching from mail to contacts to calendars, for example. Also emails with graphics appear to take more time to open than before.

It turns out that I am not the only one with these observations. You can do your favorite web search to find similar remarks.

But, the purpose of this post is simply to identify how to speed up the interaction between Outlook 2013 and the end user, because out of the box, I’m not ready to drop 2013 on my customers who are heavy Outlook users.

FIXING SLUGGISH OUTLOOK 2013

Here are the three changes that I have implemented to date to help speed up performance:

  1. Open up Outlook 2013, click File –> Option –> Advanced
    1. Scroll down to the Display section and check (turn on) the ‘Disable hardware graphics acceleration’ option
    2. Then scroll down to the Other section and UNcheck the ‘Use animations when expanding conversations and groups’ option
    3. Click OK, then restart Outlook 2013
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  2. The other recommended change is via Registry Editor:
    1. Open up Registry Editor
    2. Drill down HKey Current User –> Software –> Microsoft –> Office –> 15.0 –> common –> Graphics
    3. Right click on Graphics in the left pane, and then click New –> DWord (32 bit)
    4. Click to name this new key: DisableAnimations
    5. Double click on the new key, and change the value from 0 to 1
    6. Close registry
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You may find that a reboot may be necessary as well.

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Categories : Office 2013, Windows
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Calcheck – Microsoft’s Calendar Checking Tool

by KW · Comments (0)
Mar 07 2013

While working on a user issue with calendar items syncing properly, I came across this free Microsoft utility called CalCheck (how original!) that they released in 2012. They say that this utility works with Outlook 2003/2007/2010 and Exchange 2003/2007/2010.

Please note – this utility does NOT fix anything. Rather, it looks for calendar items that may be corrupted, creates a log file report, and optionally move those items to a separate Outlook folder for you to review.

INSTALL THE SOFTWARE:

  1. Download the CalCheck utility to your workstation, and unzip the file
  2. Locate and run CalCheck.exe with admin privileges (Run As…)
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  3. When finished, locate and review the CalCheck.log file that was created.

It appears that most Calendar item issues flagged are associated with one of the scenarios described in Microsoft’s KB  2714118 (“Calendar items that are copied are missing in Exchange Server 2007”)

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I’ll report back on my findings as it relates to the issue at hand.

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Categories : Exchange, Windows
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eM Client – Outlook replacement?

by KW · Comments (0)
Mar 06 2013

So, when your neighbor or family member decided to purchase a new PC, how long did it take for them to discover that Outlook Express is not available on Windows 7?

And when they called you to complain, what direction did you turn for a replacement email client? Thunderbird? Eudora? Windows Live Mail? something else? Well, there are pros and cons to each of the above alternatives.

ENTER EM CLIENT!

A fellow MVP’er recently suggested that I take a look at eM Client. And I must admit, I’m quite impressed with it at first glance.

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PLEASE NOTE:

eM Client does not interface with Exchange. Second, eM Client has both a free and Pro (paid) version. The free version is more than suitable for the family member or neighbor you might have in mind.

GO AHEAD AND INSTALL IT!

  1. Yes, go ahead and download and run the eM Client install utility. It runs on both Windows 7 & 8.
  2. Click to Agree to the EULA, and click to Install.
  3. Once installed, decide whether to make eM Client your default mail application, and then click Finish.
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CONFIGURING IT IS EASY!

  1. When eM Client starts up the first time, you can select which theme to use. I went with the default Modern theme. Click Next.
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  2. You can then choose whether to import email accounts and data from either Microsoft Outlook or Windows Live Mail, or you can select to Skip Import, which is what I did on my computer, and then click Next. However, I installed eM Client on another computer that has Outlook 2007, and the import feature brought over both the data and email settings.
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  3. You can choose to let it do an Automatic Setup, by entering your email address and password. Or you can click on the Mail option and set things up manually. eM Client includes support for Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL, as well as standard POP3 or IMAP mail accounts.
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  4. For my first test, I created a new email address on one of my web sites, with a mail server that supports both POP3 and IMAP. From the eM Client window, I entered my email address and password, clicked a couple of buttons, and voila! we are up and running.
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EM CLIENT FEATURES

You can read the long list of features for yourself from the eM Client website. I’ll just point out three things right now:

  1. The first feature is that it looks like Outlook (without the Ribbon Line)!
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  2. The second feature is that I imported an email account with a default PST file nearly 7GB in size, plus an archive PST file over 4GB in size, and it all imported fine – mail, calendar, contacts and tasks!
  3. The third feature I like is that eM Client includes a built in backup utility, that can be configured and runs via Windows Task Scheduler. Yes, no big deal to most of us, but it sure is a nice feature for my neighbor!
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Categories : News, Windows
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