I have faith that readers of this blog have enough good sense not to use social networking sites to send important emails. However, some of your users may lack that good sense, and so it behooves us all to send out a common sense reminder every now and then—only use your official corporate email for anything important or sensitive! Save the Facebook email messages for updates about parties, casual observations, and idle gossip.

Wall Street Journal reporter Zach Seward got to have a glimpse of some of that idle gossip last week after Facebook made a major blunder, and some people received emails from complete strangers that were meant for somebody else. Seward gives us a glimpse of what goes on in Facebook with a few unnamed excerpts. The editor became privy to love triangles, petty jealousies, teenage parties and other truly fascinating but private missives.

The glitch was caught shortly after it started and was resolved, but not before several emails were incorrectly routed. Although there is no data being released as to how many users were affected, Facebook noted that “During our regular code push early Wednesday evening, a bug caused some misrouting to a small number of users for a short period of time.”

There have been other security blunders in the past, including a glitch in March 2008 that made it possible to publicly view photos that had been marked as private.

A report on the Wall Street Journal details the experience of a Journal editor who received several of the errant messages. According to the report, the editor received over 100 messages, ranging from ordinary to explicit.

Facebook recently redesigned its inbox interface to make it resemble Gmail.

Most everyone likes to have their systems auto complete or auto resolve names of recipients as they type. It makes for a more productive working environment.

But sometimes your end users will find that auto complete is not working. Other users might be typing a partial name in the To: field but when they hit the tab button it will take a couple seconds or so to auto resolve the recipient’s name.

For the users that are having the problem of auto resolve not working it can be a more than frustrating experience. For those users, an administrator can have them manually prompt for an auto resolve by trying the Check Name button or by pressing the CTRL+K keystroke sequence.

Another area of potential trouble is the cache that is used with the automatic completion mechanism. When names are resolved as users type in recipient names there is a nickname list that is automatically generated and maintained by Outlook. This nickname list is used for both the automatic name checking and the automatic completion. The nickname list is a collection of all the email addresses that have been used for sending email that show up on the To, Cc or Bcc fields. This is one of the first locations that Outlook checks for name checking and name resolutions.

When your users are experiencing name completion problems or problems with name checking it can be caused by a corrupted name cache. Such problems can be manifested by misidentifications of recipients resulting in name resolutions which look like amalgams of company mergers and acquisitions. Other miscues can include incorrect recipient’s names being produced or, worse, messages actually being sent to unintended recipients.

If you are using Microsoft Windows XP and you suspect that the nickname cache is corrupted you can try to clean it out by following the steps outlined below. Make sure that Outlook is not running before starting the steps below. Continue reading Troubleshooting Name Checking and Resolving Issues

Context can groom an unruly inbox.

As important as email has become as a productivity tool, it remains for many a mystery. Wrestling with an unruly inbox can feel like grappling with an alligator in a tar pit.

One reason for that is that many people treat email messages as discrete items unrelated to each other. Imagine a To Do list where for every item completed, six are added. That’s what an inbox can become without imposing some context on the messages arriving in it.

Up to now, tools within email programs to create a context for messages remain relatively primitive, but in the future, they will gain sophistication. That doesn’t mean, however, that even with today’s rudimentary tools a measure of context can be imposed on incoming and outgoing mail.

Most email applications have the ability to create folders and filters for messages. They can be tailored to create context. For example, there are people with whom you correspond that need to be elevated out of the daily din of electronic epistles. A folder for people you report to might make sense. After creating the folder, you can create filters based on their email addresses that will automatically funnel messages to and from them into the folder. By the same token, you might want to create folders for individual clients to capture correspondence between you and them.

Working on a project? A folder can be created for that, too. Within the folder, subfolders can be created for project milestones and filters made to channel messages from team members into those subfolders.

Continue reading Control email bloat with context strategies

Email attachments must be sent, received, opened and closed on a daily basis. When a user cannot open an attachment you can be sure that an administrator is going to hear about it. Sometimes there are problems with saving attachments; other times the problems show up when a user attempts to open an attachment.

Some error messages are related to Outlook’s attachment security settings. Other times the error message might be a result of a suspected virus as reported by the user’s anti-virus software.

The most common error message displayed will be something like:

“Cannot create file: file name. Right-click the folder you want to create the file in and click Properties on the shortcut menu to check your permissions for the folder.”

This error message can be an indication of a lack of sufficient permissions of the Temporary Internet Files folder stored on a server. You can fix this problem by configuring Outlook to use a specific folder for temporary internet files.

If Outlook 2000 is being used then you’ll have to make changes to the Registry. As always, before making any edits to the Registry you should always make a backup. That way if any errors are made then you will have a good working backup point that you can restore to.

Continue reading Outlook Cannot Create or Open Attachment

In another post I discussed the situation of emails that are not sent and are instead stuck in the email outbox. The flip side of that problem is when emails that are in the email inbox seemingly disappear. This can occur after email messages have been read. It can also happen if the preview pane has been opened and the email has not yet been read.

What might be happening is that a filter is being applied that only displays unread messages. Obviously what needs to happen is to either remove the filter or modify it.

If you want to reset to a known state you can also just remove all filters. This is a very easy procedure.

• In Outlook 2000 bring up the View menu and move to the Current View.
• Once there you can click on Customize Current View.
• This will bring up a View Summary dialog box where you can then choose Filter which will pop up the Filter dialog box.
• Here you’ll want to click on Clear All and then click OK or hit enter a couple times to exit the dialog.
• You should now be able to view all email messages whether they are read or unread.

There is another possible cause for disappearing emails. If one of your end users has managed to set Outlook so that email delivery is pointed at a personal folder file such as a pst file then this can have the undesirable consequence of disappearing email.

Continue reading How to prevent emails disappearing from the inbox

Administration of Outlook will involve having to troubleshoot why emails sometimes get stuck in the email outbox.

There are times when clients are connected to your Exchange Server and your users are receiving their emails just fine. But when they attempt to send emails the emails get stuck in the email outbox. You open the Sent Items folder but you do not see the expected emails which indicate that they were not sent. Sometimes there are attachments and sometimes not, so this problem might appear random. All this can happen even while Outlook is connected.

Although users will have an imap connection configured for their email client no email can get sent through the Exchange Server. Sometimes your users’ data is stored in a local pst file and not on the Exchange Server.

They might also receive a Progress window that reports a Microsoft Exchange Server error message such as 0×80040115. It indicates that Exchange Server is unavailable and also indicates that Outlook is itself offline.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Stuck Email in the Outbox

As companies and organizations grow in size, departments internally supporting the business grow as well. IT of course is one that must scale to accommodate business needs. If your department is small, it’s very likely that you know how all the components in your IT infrastructure are configured, what they are, what they do, and so forth. You know not only which servers host what resources, but know about the configuration of users in Active Directory, you may be responsible for provisioning those users, and for setting them up with VPN access, server access, and other actions unrelated to configuring the user in Exchange or giving them a mailbox as well as a login. You may be thinking, “Of course, Clemmer, but doesn’t everyone know about all the elements in a network and how the interrelate with email?”

Well, in larger organizations both operational responsibilities and security policies make the separation of duties for IT staff a reality. What does this mean? Well, the person who manages the firewalls and configures rules to allow email traffic between company sites or business units is very likely not the same email admin who is going to configure the SMTP connector or inter-site replication. The staff member that gets information from human resources and provisions accounts is likely not the same staff member that builds out hardware for servers, or configures desktops or notebooks for the new users. The security staff that manage proxies, load balancers, network anti-virus solutions and other security solutions are not the ones that will perform tuning and regular maintenance to your email servers, in most all cases. If you have backup and storage managed by a separate group in the IT staff, they may or may not know the specifics of backing up an Exchange database or server.

Continue reading Is Separation of Duties in IT a Help or a Hindrance?

By now, every business knows that they need to archive their emails, for convenience, as well as for compliance, e-discovery, and disaster recovery purposes. But once archived, how long do you need to keep them?

There’s really no fixed answer, as is often the case when lawyers are involved. But what’s most important is that there is a written policy about data retention, and that it is followed to the letter, documented, and has an audit trail. The reason for this is clear. Suppose for example, that you are subject to a lawsuit, and opposing counsel has demanded records pertaining to a certain subject. You provide records going back two years. But you have no written policy on data retention. Guess what? Even if the records you provide show no evidence of your guilt, you still lose by default. That is of course, assuming that your opponent has a competent lawyer. The logic behind this is that since you have no retention policy, you may have deleted older emails that showed your liability. 

Now suppose that you do have a written retention policy that says you archive all emails for two years. But, there’s no formal audit trail that shows when those archives are accessed. Again, you lose. Opposing counsel will argue that without an audit trail, there is no reason to believe that you haven’t gone in and erased the evidence! Oh, those tricky lawyers.

Continue reading Email archives, retention periods, and tricky lawyers

There are many occasions when your users will receive error messages when they attempt to send and receive emails via Outlook or Outlook Express.

You can start your diagnostic process by going through the error logs but oftentimes you will see the same error messages over and over again. Most problems are related to connections between the email clients and the email server(s). It could be that the email server is not available or the connection is down. Sometimes it’s just a matter of a slow network or a faulty physical connection.

I once had a situation in our office where one of our users was complaining about their connection for several days. We would run network diagnostics and troubleshoot their network transmission and receiving speeds. Some days everything would be okay but then the problem would reappear. It was only after another employee left the company that we learned through another party that the ex-employee had been routinely sabotaging the other employee’s physical LAN connection. Sometimes not fully inserting the connector into the connector opening was all it took to make it appear that there was an intermittent problem with their network. And since email was the first thing the victimized employee checked in the morning they thought it was related to the email server.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Send and Receive Error Messages

The problem of how to grant services to end users of Microsoft Outlook is solved through the use of Messaging API (MAPI) profiles.

MAPI profiles are how administrators configure user accounts to describe their service options such as their mailbox and directories that are available to the end user. The profiles can be used to define and describe the location of an end user’s offline folder store (OST) and personal folder store (PST).

MAPI profiles contain registry settings and can be edited using “regedit”. Always backup your registry before making any changes. Most of the registry settings can be found in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

Microsoft offers two tools – PROFGEN and NEWPROF – to help administrators with the administration and maintenance of user account profiles. These tools can be used to edit the contents of the MAPI profiles and can help with diagnosing problems associated with MAPI profiles. Other tools are available.

Another tool you can use to modify profile settings is the NewProf.exe utility that is included with Outlook. You can get more information about how to use this utility by reviewing the following site in the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN):
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms527375.aspx

(The above link has been retired. Please use the following link for more information about how to use the NewProf.exe utility.)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/145905 

You can also review the article number, 145905, in the Microsoft Knowledge Base for more information about the Newprof.exe command line options. Continue reading Creating MAPI Profiles