Blog: Outlook 2007

Setting up additional accounts in Outlook is handy to get email from different servers.  You can use additional accounts to send email from those different mailboxes also.  But did you know that you can use this feature to send email from different email addresses that are set up on your Exchange server?  For example, if email messages you send come from example@example.com, but you also want to be able to send email from example@example.org.  Here is a step by step guide on how to do this in Outlook 2007:

• Go to Tools->Account Settings
• E-mail tab
• New...
• Next >
• Manually configure server settings...
• Next >
• Internet E-mail
• Next >
• Enter your name, email address such as example@example.org
• Account type POP3
• Incoming mail server exchserver1.example.org
• Outgoing mail server (SMTP) exchserver1.example.org
• Enter username as <your domain>\<your username> and your domain password
• If you save the password, you will have to update it here when you change it
• You can choose the Test Account Settings...
• It will get an error retrieving email using POP3, but we don't need that
• Next >
• Finish

At the bottom of the Accounts Settings window, be sure it is using your inbox for receiving messages. [more]

Go to Tools->Send/Receive->Send/Receive Settings->Define Send/Receive Groups
Edit the All Accounts group (and possibly any other groups) to exclude this account
This will prevent it from trying to retrieve email using POP3 all the time

Now, to send email from that email address, select that account from the Account dropdown under the Send button.

Email usability: Best Practices for Microsoft Outlook 2007.  Here are three things that I would like to mention to help manage email.

1)  Set up a search folder and include many folders – inbox, rss feeds, mailing lists, Communicator conversations, etc.  This will put all items you need to consider in one place.

2)  Set up a rule to flag for follow up for all items.  Use the 4 D's for handling email: Delete it, Do it (respond, take action, file), Delegate it (forward it), or Defer it.  Once the email it taken care of, mark it complete.

3)  Use sorting and searching to find items.  You can click on the column headers to sort, then start typing the contents of the field and it will jump to those items.  An even better way (but requiring more typing) is searching.  Since our Exchange server indexes these items, searching is really fast.  You can enter search terms in the format keyword:value to find items.  For example, subject:"sql account" from:john, will find that email from John about that sql account.  To find the available keywords, search for help on “narrow your search” to find the topic “Learn to narrow your search criteria for better searches in Outlook”.  You can also search contacts and calendars. [more]

These ideas came from an article by Melissa MacBeth called Best Practices for Microsoft Outlook 2007, available at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA103715211033.aspx.  This is a long article, but it has many good ideas.

If you’ve ever wanted to restore the original Outlook shortcut to the desktop, you’ve probably found that a normal shortcut that points to outlook.exe (the kind with an arrow on the icon) lacks some of the functionality that the original Outlook icon had (for instance the ability to edit your machines “Mail” settings by right clicking and choosing properties). To restore the Outlook original icon to the desktop, edit the registry as outlined in the following KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/238567

Viewing other user’s default and custom categories in Outlook 2007 public folders must have the same category name.  By default, Outlook 2007 has six default color categories named: red category, blue category, green category, etc..  At a customer site, users had been marking tasks in a public folder indicating who was working on which e-mail.  One user created new custom categories (ex. John Doe's Tasks) and assigned it a color, then deleted the “red category” default category.  When she removed the default categories, she could no longer see what anyone else had marked nor could they see her new category markings. [more]

In order for all users to see custom category names, each user must have the same exact category name created in their category list.  You can re-add the default categories back in by creating new ones and naming it back to the default (ex. red category).  Color assignments do not matter, only the name.

Recently one of our clients was having problems viewing an image that was embedded (not a linked image) into an email. Other recipients of this same email and the image would display correctly. Where the image should have appeared, there was simply an outline of where the image should appear with a red X in the upper left hand corner of the image blank. After checking to make sure the Outlook security settings were configured to display images in emails, I discovered that the little known (and invisible) OutlookSecureTempFolder was ‘full’ and that by emptying it out, images would display correctly in the emails. Here’s the nitty-gritty of what was happening: [more]

When you open attachments/images directly from an email (as opposed to saving the attachments to another location then opening them from that location) within Outlook, a copy is written to a temporary folder referred to as the OutlookSecureTempFolder. This particular user’s folder was ‘full’ (although she still had plenty of disk space.)  The trick is that to regular users this folder is invisible (even if you’ve enabled the “Show Hidden Files and Folders” setting) and its name is randomly generated. In Outlook 2007 that randomly named directory resides by default at:

In Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.Outlook\ XXXXXXXX, where XXXXXXXX can be any random characters.

In Vista:
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\XXXXXXXX,  where XXXXXXXX can be any random characters.

To find (and change if you like) the location of this randomly generated folder path, look in the registry at: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Security\OutlookSecureTempFolder

Once you find that directory, you can simply type the path directly into Windows  explorer, delete the temp files that are there, and your emails will now begin to display images. Now you can see all of those oh-so-wonderful image-laden forwards that your grandmother sends you!  If you want to bump up your security and avoid this problem at the same time then take a look at our recommendation of automatically deleting Temporary Internet Files when you logoff/shutdown in a previous post.

I was testing Symantec Endpoint Protection for a short while. After uninstalling endpoint protection I began receiving an error every time that I opened outlook. The error said something to the effect of “Unable to load Add-on please uninstall”.

In Outlook 2003 you should be able to simply remove the add-on within the add-on manager. In Outlook 2007 though it requires a different method. I had to delete a file called Extend.dat (location: C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook) which is the file that stores the cached add-ons. After running Outlook again this file was recreated but this time Outlook did not give me an add-on error.  This seems to apply to other add-ons as well. While searching the web I saw people report that this also works for similar errors after uninstalling AVG antivirus.

The Out of Office Assistant in Outlook 2007 is a bit more helpful in letting people inside the company know where you are. Microsoft has included a “Inside My Organization” and “Outside My Organization” message area. For example, if I were to set an Out of Office message for both internal and external, it would look like this: [more]

Notice how I can also set the time range that the Out of Office Assistant is running.  This is a pretty nifty new feature for Outlook 2007.