Outlook PST Hell

[Tannin]

Merc is right.

As for me, I don't get paid enough to deal with Outlook problems. Any kind of Outlook problem. If you bring a machine to me and you are still stupid enough to be running Outlook as your primary email client, I'll spend 5 minutes on it. Five minutes flat. Anything that goes wrong which I can't fix in five minutes counts as a self-inflicted injury and you will get no help from me, nor will you get any sympathy.

I have heard of doctors who refuse to treat smoking-related illnesses. Well, I refuse to treat Outlook-related problems. I have better things to do with my life.

 

[Tannin]

Just as you worded it, you have experience fixing outlook, but what about the experience in deploying it properly such that it doesn't always need fixing?

START >> RUN >> SETUP.EXE >> enter email address >> enter password >> enter name of mail server

If it needs any more than that to work properly - and by "it" I mean any mail client of any flavour - it is broken, borked, faarked, up the duff, farnarkled, trashware.

No two ways about it: if something as brain-dead simple as a mail client needs to be "deployed properly" in some sense beyond running SETUP.EXE and entering passwords and stuff, then it is beyond broken, it is laughably broken. Bloody Incredimail works straight out of the box, FFS, how hard can it be?

 

[Mercutio]

It should be noted that if Exchange is set up, configuration for a standard Outlook client is limited to either typing in server, username and password, or it's configured as part of one's profile by default and no one has to type anything in.

 

[Howell]

And you're right about the costs Merc, it's not cheap to own an exchange mail system.

 

[Handruin]

START >> RUN >> SETUP.EXE >> enter email address >> enter password >> enter name of mail server

If it needs any more than that to work properly - and by "it" I mean any mail client of any flavour - it is broken, borked, faarked, up the duff, farnarkled, trashware.

No two ways about it: if something as brain-dead simple as a mail client needs to be "deployed properly" in some sense beyond running SETUP.EXE and entering passwords and stuff, then it is beyond broken, it is laughably broken. Bloody Incredimail works straight out of the box, FFS, how hard can it be?

I think that's all I had to do when I setup Outlook 2010 at work, but that's using Exchange which is a bit different from what you're referencing. Actually I think it was even simpler because I only had to point it to the mail server. It knew everything about my mail account setting based on my NT domain user account.

Does Incredimail support a shared calendar system and integration with an Instant Messaging tool? I find those quite valuable in the field of work I am in.

 

[Tannin]

Does Incredimail support a shared calendar system and integration with an Instant Messaging tool? I find those quite valuable in the field of work I am in.

No, Incredimail supports brainless animated butlers walking across your screen announcing "you have new mail" complete with brainless sound effects that pop up when you are in the middle of doing something completely different and also lots and lots and lots and lots of different icons and clipart and assorted other brainless dodads which are, apparently, considered just perfect by the sort of brainless woman who uses Incredimail.

(Yes, it is always a woman, and although some of them are quite intelligent, they are all brainless. Otherwise they wouldn't use Incredimail.)

(Still, it's better than Outlook.)

 

[CougTek]

Incredimail is a spyware magnet. It creates vulnerabilities on a computer that would otherwise be relatively safe. It might be simple to conigure, but the issues it causes afterward aren't worth the trouble.

 

[ddrueding]

(Yes, it is always a woman, and although some of them are quite intelligent, they are all brainless. Otherwise they wouldn't use Incredimail.)

The only user I have that insists on using Incredimail is a man, but he is from New Zealand, so all bets are off

 

[Mercutio]

Incredimail is a spyware magnet. It creates vulnerabilities on a computer that would otherwise be relatively safe. It might be simple to conigure, but the issues it causes afterward aren't worth the trouble.

It's not Incredimail that's directly at fault. I've installed it and immediately run malware scans without result. I think it's more that the kind of person who installs Incredimail is the kind of person who uncontrollably collects malware anyway while they're finding new shiny stuff to click on.

 

[Tannin]

Incredimail is a spyware magnet. It creates vulnerabilities on a computer that would otherwise be relatively safe. It might be simple to conigure, but the issues it causes afterward aren't worth the trouble.

1: show me some evidence of this claim, please. Frankly, I don't believe it. I have heard this claim a zillion times, but no-one has ever substantiated it. In reality, Incredimail and spyware only go together because Incredimail users are clueless. It ain't the software that causes the infections, it's the users.

2: Don't think for one instant that I am recommending this steaming pile of donkey droppings! Me recommend Incredimail? tell you what, slip me an email the next time you see Mercutio recommending that we all run Adobe Acrobat on Western Digital drives with graphics by Nvidia. When you see that happen - not before - I'll consider recommending Incredimail. The only reason I brought it up was that Handruin claimed that Mercutio's Outlook unreliability problems were caused by not "deploying it properly such that it doesn't always need fixing". I believed him ('cause Doug is no fool, and since I completely refuse to work on Outlook beyond the "have you checked the password" level, I have no relevant experience of my own) but everybody seems to be falling over themselves to deny what Doug said. Whatever. I only brought up Incredimail because it was the worst email client I could think off the top of my head, but (according to Handruin) it still beats Outlook.

3: That New Zealand chap. Don't bother locking up your daughters. But keep an eye on your sons.

 

[Tannin]

while they're finding new shiny stuff to click on.

Nailed it.

 

[Mercutio]

3: That New Zealand chap. Don't bother locking up your daughters. But keep an eye on your sons.

You misspelled "sheep", I think.

 

[Handruin]

No, Incredimail supports brainless animated butlers walking across your screen announcing "you have new mail" complete with brainless sound effects that pop up when you are in the middle of doing something completely different and also lots and lots and lots and lots of different icons and clipart and assorted other brainless dodads which are, apparently, considered just perfect by the sort of brainless woman who uses Incredimail.

(Yes, it is always a woman, and although some of them are quite intelligent, they are all brainless. Otherwise they wouldn't use Incredimail.)

(Still, it's better than Outlook.)

Bummer, you almost had me sold since the product was so simple. I thought your implication was that Incredimail was a good product, but I was incorrect. I've never used it, so I can't judge it.

I understand you're trying to graphically illustrate you dislike Outlook based on your comparison to something you clearly dislike. You could have just said "I dislike Outlook." and then elaborate as to what specifically you had problems with. That would be interesting to learn about over all the years you've dealt with computers and software.

As mentioned earlier, I use Outlook because I have to, but even then...it's not been a bad experience in over 10 years (and multiple versions of the product). Over ten years of 5-6 days per week of roughly 8-10 hours per day of writing hundreds of emails, managing dozens of meetings, etc (minus vacations and sick leave of course). Outlook never even blips on my radar in comparison to frustration levels. The one software I've wanted to pull my hair out due to frustration is Rational ClearCase, but that's another story.

I understand that several (if not many of you) clearly dislike Outlook and have significant issues with it. There are different uses (IMAP/POP3/Exchange) and I'm only covering one of them (Exchange). In my limited experience with it, I've not shared the problems that you all have.

There are two things I would like to add to Outlook to make it a better experience. One would be a google-like searching ability as found in gmail. Second would be labels which are also found in gmail. Aside from Outlook, 99% of my remaining time related to managing email is browser based. I don't even care about thick-client based email, it's so 2000's.

 

[Handruin]

2: Don't think for one instant that I am recommending this steaming pile of donkey droppings! Me recommend Incredimail? tell you what, slip me an email the next time you see Mercutio recommending that we all run Adobe Acrobat on Western Digital drives with graphics by Nvidia. When you see that happen - not before - I'll consider recommending Incredimail. The only reason I brought it up was that Handruin claimed that Mercutio's Outlook unreliability problems were caused by not "deploying it properly such that it doesn't always need fixing". I believed him ('cause Doug is no fool, and since I completely refuse to work on Outlook beyond the "have you checked the password" level, I have no relevant experience of my own) but everybody seems to be falling over themselves to deny what Doug said. Whatever. I only brought up Incredimail because it was the worst email client I could think off the top of my head, but (according to Handruin) it still beats Outlook.

3: That New Zealand chap. Don't bother locking up your daughters. But keep an eye on your sons.

I asked if the unreliability problems could be due to configuration problems, but not specifically to discredit or imply malice toward Mercutio or his technical abilities. Any overly-complex product opens the door(s) to exponential variations and exponential ways to screw up the configuration and deployment such that unreliability because the norm more than anything else.

Did I somehow imply Incredimail still beats Outlook in my earlier posts? I did so without knowing.

Unrelated: I realize I've stated my service time with Outlook far too frequently and I sound like a broken record which is annoying. My apologies for that annoying repetitiousness.

 

[Tannin]

I can't believe that anyone would think that I'd recommend Incredimail. (Or indeed that anyone else here would recommend it. Well, maybe Trinton Azaleth or whatever his name was. It would be about his speed.) I probably said the plain vanilla version of "I dislike Outlook" here a decade ago. If you liked that better, just read some older posts!

Doug, if you actually don't believe that Outlook needs special configuration to run reliably, why did you say it did?

Merc: are we talking girl sheep here, or boy sheep?

(No. Don't answer that. I don't think we need to go there.)

-----------------------------

Doug, maybe you deserve a serious answer, though it really shouldn't be necessary. Why do I dislike Outlook? Because it looses people's data. Regularly and consistently. There is an entire [industry devoted to the arcane art of recovering lost Outlook data. Compare with (for example) Thunderbird. Yes, you can lose data out of Thunderbird, but you almost never do. It just works. Despite the fact that it is the second most popular email client on the planet, it doesn't support a whole massive parasitic industry of data rescue software and specialist people. Why not? A few reasons, but mostly because it actually works properly in the first place.

 

[Tannin]

Forget Q2 - you already answered it via cross-post.

 

[Handruin]

I can't believe that anyone would think that I'd recommend Incredimail. (Or indeed that anyone else here would recommend it. Well, maybe Trinton Azaleth or whatever his name was. It would be about his speed.) I probably said the plain vanilla version of "I dislike Outlook" here a decade ago. If you liked that better, just read some older posts!

Doug, if you actually don't believe that Outlook needs special configuration to run reliably, why did you say it did?

Merc: are we talking girl sheep here, or boy sheep?

(No. Don't answer that. I don't think we need to go there.)

-----------------------------

Doug, maybe you deserve a serious answer, though it really shouldn't be necessary. Why do I dislike Outlook? Because it looses people's data. Regularly and consistently. There is an entire [industry devoted to the arcane art of recovering lost Outlook data. Compare with (for example) Thunderbird. Yes, you can lose data out of Thunderbird, but you almost never do. It just works. Despite the fact that it is the second most popular email client on the planet, it doesn't support a whole massive parasitic industry of data rescue software and specialist people. Why not? A few reasons, but mostly because it actually works properly in the first place.

That's a very reasonable question and I suspect my answer may invalidate my earlier argument(s). Based on the time I've spent managing Outlook (which is very minimal and it is in an exchange environment) it really hasn't required any overly complex configurations in order to make it run. My "management" of Outlook consists of install and upgrade in limited quantities (less than a dozen). Beyond that I consider everything else as end-user tasks and actually using the software as-intended. In both cases I've had minimal to no issues. Including no data loss.

When I first asked the question, I made the assumption that in Mercutio's or Coug's deployments that they were dealing with a more-complex configuration. I hadn't thought about the configuration and setup until you posed the example for Incredimail which was "START >> RUN >> SETUP.EXE >> enter email address >> enter password >> enter name of mail server". I stopped to think about my last install/upgrade and in honesty it was at least as easy as you asserted an email client should be. However, I realize that the complexity in my situation likely (but I can't say for sure) resides in the setup and configuration of a distributed Exchange server environment. With that said, you're right, Outlook wasn't complex. I just have this perception that Outlook is overly complex for email...which in regards to user-functionality, it kind of is.

Coming back to Mercutio and Coug, their problem descriptions seem to apply to non-exchange configurations and deployments (hopefully they'll correct me if I'm wrong). I guess I'm the one comparing the apples to their oranges with respect to Outlook's unpleasantries and maybe rolling a bit of end user functionality into the complexity of management. Where that line is drawn could be different for each person.

Doug, maybe you deserve a serious answer, though it really shouldn't be necessary. Why do I dislike Outlook? Because it looses people's data. Regularly and consistently. There is an entire [industry devoted to the arcane art of recovering lost Outlook data. Compare with (for example) Thunderbird. Yes, you can lose data out of Thunderbird, but you almost never do. It just works. Despite the fact that it is the second most popular email client on the planet, it doesn't support a whole massive parasitic industry of data rescue software and specialist people. Why not? A few reasons, but mostly because it actually works properly in the first place.

I'm asking to learn more about why, not to specifically question if your opinion/experience with the product is right/wrong. It's often times hard to get this specific information from people on this forum because their intents and actions to display hate for a given product or company greatly overshadows the valuable information which is related more to why they hate them then displaying the actual hate itself. The funny retorts and snide remarks about why company A sucks donkey balls for breakfast or why company B needs to die a horrible miserable death are fun, but not always useful.

This industry does exist...I work for a company that even dedicates a small portion of its portfolio of offerings to help manage and protect these people's data using Exchange. The difference is that it's in a large enterprise environment. How do you get an email, calendar, & communication/planning application to scale to 40K-100K people? If Outlook wasn't the focus of this industry, who else would be next in line (Lotus notes?)? I can't imagine using Thunderbird in this environment,specifically because I don't think it has the integrated features that may be needed. Maybe it works fine, I honestly can't say. How would one manage that many users with a proper backup strategy? What would be used as the back-end mail server for that many people? How is it distributed world wide? Would another similar industry arrive for this....probably.

Just to be clear, I'm not advocating for Outlook, I'm just not seeing the same doom and gloom as everyone else. I would be just as happy to have an approach like David has in using the google apps for email hosting through gmail. For security reasons I'm sure my company would never consider this, but having a in-house version of this would be appealing.

 

[Mercutio]

re: Outlook in non-Exchange deployments, there is a not-insignificant population of users who are simply convinced that Outlook is the thing to use for E-mail. There is no reason for this, other than the fact that it's the tool provided with Office, and MS Word and Ms Excel are also The Things To Use.

In theory, these setups should not be complex. You're telling a POP client to fetch some mail. Maybe sometimes you'll deal with an advanced user who needs to check TWO POP accounts. Chances are that the end user won't even notice the fact that Outlook supports the Calendar and Notes and other crap that Outlook does.

But Outlook still manages to eat itself. I do not know how it happens. I will state with no hyperbole that there are an astonishing number of ways that Outlook-the-stand-alone-client can kill itself, where one of the half-dozen or so database files or registry locations can be hosed beyond usability, and furthermore Outlook with Exchange just pushes some of that complexity and those configuration files back to the server end. And because it's E-mail, driving force of modern business, everything else must be dropped until E-mail is working again.


re: Other product options: Why do we care? We can get the same functionality from web services if we actually need it, and I have observed that even in organizations with 100% deployment of Outlook/Exchange, many users do not make any use at all of shared calendars and contacts. I recognize that there exists a need for private enterprise messaging software in the world, but I don't know why we have to tie it to a component of Microsoft Office.

 

[Tannin]

Mate, for enterprise-level stuff, I have no clue! I stopped having anything at all to do with companies of any size ... oh ... five, no, more like 10 years ago. I deal with homes and small businesses, professional people, stuff like that - up to maybe five or six computers would be typical. I never liked dealing with the bigger companies back when we were big enough ourselves to have to take on all the work that we could get, and once I started scaling things back so that I could have a life as well as a job, the big places were the first to get the flick.

But you certainly wouldn't want to use Thunderbird for that sort of task - it would be like using a nice Honda motorcycle engine in ar truck. Although that's not very fair to Honda - Thunderbird is clunky and needs a lot of work that it doesn't seem to get. The interface is barely OK, the search is almost useless, and there are weird stupidities that just shouldn't make it into a mature, shipping product in this current century - such as the idiotic way, after you delete one item from an in-box, it locks you out and won't let you do any more while it re-indexes.

But it is nevertheless a vastly superior email client to Outlook or (as you see more often) Outlook Express, primarily because it is much safer from not-losing-data point of view, but also because it is much easier to use than Outlook (Outlook Outlook, not Outlook Express I mean for ease of use) and people rarely get lost using it and call for help.

Someone ought to write a decent email program. If there was a decent client out there, we might not think that email was "so 2000s". The dated part of email is the decade-old client software we use.

Actually, someone probably did write a decent client, but it's not free, so no-one uses it. I think the Bat is pretty good. Never bothered looking very hard for myself though - I only ignore most of my emails, so why should I care what program I ignore it with?

 

[ddrueding]

The decent free e-mail client is GMail. Easiest to use, least likely to crash, most powerful, scalable, supporting huge message stores without any speed impact at all, with the best AV and SPAM filters out there.

Get a GMail account, add the account you care about, done.

 

[Tannin]

Gmail doesn't work if you aren't connected all the time. That is a deal breaker. Same with all that other useless cloud rubbish.

(Different for city people, sure. No good out here in the real world though.)

 

[Mercutio]

I'm genuinely not a big fan of Gmail's web interface, which is why I prefer to deal with Thunderbird or elm or something else to begin with. I like having a place to forward E-mails so that I don't have to work to maintain an internet-facing IMAP server of my own, but Gmail itself is inconsistent and idiosyncratic to me.

And of course, Gmail isn't an option for organizations that have their own data retention and security requirements that prevent outsourcing that service.

 

[Mercutio]

Gmail doesn't work if you aren't connected all the time.

Actually, there's an offline Gmail doohickey you can install on your computer to provide full access to email without an internet connection, if you need something like that.

 

[Chewy509]

My personal experience with Outlook falls into 2 categories:

With Exchange - the most common problem (which is extremely rare) is a corrupt profile on the client PC, and haven't seen that in 5 yrs. The only other problem I've seen is when using the "RPC via HTTP" option in Outlook 2007+ to connect to Exchange. Sometimes Outlook will want to bring down your entire mailbox again, despite the local copy having everything? Again, if you delete the local profile and cache files, setup the profile again it works fine again. But overall no major hair pulling issues that haven't been fixed in 5 minutes.

Standalone - I've seen many instances of corrupt PSTs, but the common factor appears to be some plugin or utility that has attached itself to Outlook for either SPAM filtering, AV or PDA/Phone sync. Any Outlook installation without any of those in my experience appears to have significantly less issues.

As for Outlook alternatives, I personally use Thunderbird with Lightning (for tasks/calendars) which works fantastically with a POP3 account. There are some Google Calendar and Exchange Calendar plugins for Thunderbird as well now... Add in IMAP support for GMail, and the plugin for Google Calendar, makes using Thunderbird a viable option for a small business setup.

Evolution is another alternative, and considering it has Exchange support built-in it appears to be common in mixed Linux/Solaris/Windows environments where Exchange is used.

As mentioned earlier - Lotus Notes. Last time I used Lotus Notes (about 7 yrs old), the experience was awful. I won't say any more.

 

[Chewy509]

This is a little off-topic, but one of the reasons I dislike Outlook is not having the ability to default having your reply below the original text.

Heck even RFC 1855 - Netiquette Guidelines (published in 1995) has:

If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just enough text of the original to give a context. This will make sure readers understand when they start to read your response.

This makes what you are replying to, to be in proper context of the original text and makes it easier for the reader to understand what you are replying to.

Just about every email program I've used with the exception of anything put out by Microsoft has this ability...

Mind you, all my personal email is set to send in UTF-8 only, none of this RichText or HTML bloat so maybe I'm getting old. (I often wonder how much electricity is wasted on using HTML over straight straight UTF-8 text, especially with all the additional information MS products typically embed with HTML emails).

Hint: for Thunderbird, it's in Edit > Account Settings > Composition & Addressing.

 

[ddrueding]

Ugh. I hate having the new text on the bottom. It just means I need to scroll more to read long threads. Not to mention the disaster when one person decides to make their reply on the bottom and everyone else leaves it on the top. After a few rounds of that you need to look at time stamps to make any sense of it.

 

[LunarMist]

I don't understand why the new text should be at the bottom where it is difficult to find. That would make printing a long chain a hassle too. Often I only print the first two pages of a lengthy e-mail for example.

 

[Chewy509]

Part of the point is, that your reply should only contain the minimum of the original message to gain context, thereby minimising the size of the whole email. It is completely wasteful to include the complete 10-20 other replies to the thread in the single email.

 

[ddrueding]

Part of the point is, that your reply should only contain the minimum of the original message to gain context, thereby minimising the size of the whole email. It is completely wasteful to include the complete 10-20 other replies to the thread in the single email.

True, but it is also wasteful to spend your time pruning other people's messages when they are unlikely to read their own words anyway.

 

[LunarMist]

Part of the point is, that your reply should only contain the minimum of the original message to gain context, thereby minimising the size of the whole email. It is completely wasteful to include the complete 10-20 other replies to the thread in the single email.

I prefer to keep one long chain where possible rather than each of 5-10 sections separately.

 

[Mercutio]

Reply at the bottom, or reply after quote is proper formatting. It pisses me off, too. I've bitched about it here before. It's particularly annoying when Outlook users tell me that the way I reply is incorrect.

 

[Chewy509]

Reply at the bottom, or reply after quote is proper formatting. It pisses me off, too. I've bitched about it here before. It's particularly annoying when Outlook users tell me that the way I reply is incorrect.

Thanks, I was starting to wonder if I was the odd one out?

 

[Mercutio]

Thanks, I was starting to wonder if I was the odd one out?

Nope. The simple truth is that if it's a default Outlook behavior, it's probably wrong.

 

[Sol]

From a technical standpoint both ways are "wrong" the sane thing to do would be to put the quoted text in to some meta-data fields allowing the recipient to view it, or not, however the hell they like.

Putting everything in each message is a waste, right up until you need to forward it to someone. Emails pretty much need to be self contained because they can't realistically refer to one another. If you get a message on a different device than the previous message in a thread or you add a recipient part way through a thread you need it all to be there. Putting it all in plain text is a bit crap though regardless of which bit you put on top.

 

[time]

I'm having my own version of PST hell at the moment with Outlook 2010.

The PC started out using POP3, with the PST migrated from Outlook 2003 - that's PST #1.

As a stopgap, I created a Gmail account and uploaded all the folders to it - that's PST #2.

Now, I've finished copying all the folders to a Google Apps mailbox - that's PST #3.

The problem is that there are 3 Inboxes etc. While playing around trying to get rid of the now empty POP3 one, I've removed the Google Apps one. From what I've read, it looks like there's no way to put it back!

I've tried creating new profiles, but I'm always forced to create a new email account as well - there's no way to re-use the perfectly good existing 2.5GB PST file. Also, I still end up with multiple Inboxes.

Microsoft's notes suggest that you can change the Default email account and/or data file, but that turns out to be mostly wrong in Outlook 2010.

On top of that, I need to get the contacts back out of the first PST file.

Does anyone understand Outlook enough to help unravel this?

 

[Mercutio]

Do the files still exist on the PC? Did you kill the profile or the data?

The stuff that's on Gmail is still on Gmail, but it might not be immediately visible, because it might not be tagged with a "label", which is what other IMAP clients understand as a folder. You can usually find that stuff in the All Mail grouping.

You can re-use the existing .psts by adding them to an existing email account, then copying the relevant data into whatever .pst you actually want to keep. Duplicate items will probably happen, but it might be a less awful ring of hell than the one you're in right now.

 

[time]

I still have the files, but no idea how to backup the profile, which I've probably ruined by deleting the one that I really wanted to keep.

I think what you're saying is that you can't use the mailbox parameters from an existing PST file - you always have to create a new one manually? What about Import?

I have a growing suspicion that Outlook 2010 won't ever let you re-use a PST for IMAP; the option to append emails to an existing PST disappears when you select IMAP instead of POP3. I'm probably going to have to manually set up the account parameters in a new PST, then download everything from the IMAP server.

What about the contacts? How do you get at the damn things so you can control which PST they live in?

 

[Mercutio]

Yes it will. You're not going to Import the PST. You're going to add it to a mail account. You're right that the account parameters (username/password, server settings) aren't stored in the .pst. They're in the profile. You can just as easily attach somebody else's pst to your outlook profile if you want. It makes no difference to Outlook.

Anyway, go to Control Panel > Mail. Click Data Files. Click Add. Add as many PSTs as you'd like. They'll all show up in your folder list the next time you start Outlook. Then you can start moving or copying crap around.

And yes, the bullshit of figuring out what setting is stored with what data file is one of the things I hate about Outlook.

 

[time]

Thanks. And the contacts? I can't see how I can even copy them - they just appear when the right PST file is connected to the profile.

 

[Mercutio]

Contacts are either in the PST or in the Windows Address book. If they're in the PST they can be copied just like anything else. You can choose which PST's contacts you want to look at in the category view thingy.

Since Gmail is in the mix, you can also make a nice .csv or something and import their contacts to that as well.