Email is one of the most important communications tools for businesses. When it stops working, people start to get nervous.

While there are many things that a user can do to mess up their email, many of these problems can be resolved with a restart of the software or the computer.

However when the old standby of restarting doesn’t work, it is time for the email administrator to start looking into the issue a bit more deeply.

Here are some of the more common errors found in Outlook 2007 along with some of the ways you can make things right again: Continue reading 5 Common Outlook Errors and How to Fix Them

Over the years, Microsoft has taken its lumps when it comes to security however as a company, they have taken some pretty impressive strides to make sure that their products are more secure.

However, their security efforts have not been limited to just their products. They have launched several educational campaigns aimed at helping users better secure their computers and networks. Continue reading Email Security Best Practices from Microsoft

There was a time when using PST files were thought to be the solution to file storage problems. Getting emails out of the user’s mailbox and onto a shared repository not only freed up email inboxes from increasing file sizes, but also gave admins a central location in which all emails could be backed up and archived.

Add to these benefits the fact that PST files could be separated so emails related to a project, client, subject, etc could be stored and archived separately, and many would think that this solution was all that an IT department would need to manage their archiving and storage needs.

Of course PST files aren’t a panacea; they have many problems associated with them. Continue reading Two Big Problems With PST Files

Continuing my predecessor’s efforts, in this post we are going to take a deeper look at resource mailboxes in Exchange 2010. These special purpose mailboxes are used for scheduling conference rooms, audio-visual equipment, bridge lines, loaner laptops, and any other resource that may be in broad demand and for which Outlook is a good choice to use for reserving the resource.

Meeting or conference rooms are a natural fit, since in the process of scheduling a meeting, most of the time you will need a place to hold the meeting. Extending this paradigm to other shared resources is a natural fit. When you want to use Exchange and Outlook to manage a shared resource, you create either a room mailbox, or an equipment mailbox using the EMC or EMS. This will create a disabled user account in Active Directory to represent the item. Then mailbox is used to hold calendar entries, and you populate the user object with attributes appropriate to the resource. For rooms, this can include the seating capacity, location, and whether or not there is a projector or display system. For other resources this may include details such as where to pick up the resource.

Continue reading Inside Exchange 2010: Resource Mailboxes

If you receive tons of emails daily then it is imperative to know how to manage your inbox.  Emails, if not removed regularly, can clog your inbox making it look messy and disorganized.  An overloaded inbox would definitely not help you do your job better or quicker.  In fact, it may even be a cause for delays since there would be so much information that you have to deal with. An inbox that is brimming with messages can also cause your system to crash, which can delete all information from Outlook.

Another reason why you should clean your inbox regularly is that an inbox that is clogged with information would make it easy for you to lose track of important emails that require immediate action.  This is because mails would be piled up on top of each other, making it hard for you to locate critical and crucial messages.

Continue reading 6 Tips for Effective Inbox Management

In his blog, UDP Notification Support Re-added to Exchange 2010, Kevin Allison announced that Microsoft is now going to include User Datagram Protocol (UDP) notification functionality support with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.

When Exchange Server 2010 was originally released, back in 2009, it did not include support for UDP for new mail notifications. Exchange Server 2010 UDP notification support should be available in Exchange 2010 SP1 Update Rollup 3 (SP1 RU3), scheduled for March 2011. The RU3 schedule has been adjusted in order for the engineering team to complete the requisite work to include UDP support within the rollup.

Previously, whenever Outlook 2003 displayed new messages, or needed to display changes to folders, it was expecting to use UDP for those notifications. Because of the UDP change those updates would take much longer than expected. The send/receive process was also affected and would take more time than it did before with prior releases of Exchange Server. Specifically, folders would take a long time to update when an Exchange Server 2010 user used an Outlook 2003 client in online mode.

Continue reading Exchange Server 2010 and UDP Support

We’ve all heard it about a hundred times already: “Don’t open attachments from unknown senders.” And yet there will always be someone who has either forgotten the last time their system locked up and stopped functioning or they believed their system was protected from viruses. But although administrators are constantly on guard they cannot prevent attachments from being opened.

Attachments which contain viruses are most commonly sent out denoted as executables and sometimes scripts. The reason is because unsuspecting users will expectedly double click on the attachments to perform some function which they thought would help them. Sometime the attachments are sent as documents intended to inform users about some new subject.

Continue reading List of Filename Extensions Blocked by Outlook

In Outlook, email is contained in a folder for incoming mail that is known as your Inbox. Sent email messages are contained in another email folder for your Sent Items. Outlook also has folders for Deleted Items, Drafts, Junk E-mail, Outbox and Search Folders.

Search Folders do not store email messages – they are virtual folders that use the concept of “views”. It is these views that present the email messages which match search criteria that have been defined by the user. The benefit of Search Folders is that once the search query has been executed the results will remain in the appropriate Outlook folder. Those folder results can then be used over and over again without having to run the same query.

Such Search Folders include: “Unread mail”, “Mail flagged for follow up”, “Mail either unread or flagged for follow up”, “Important mail”, “Mail from and to specific people”, etc.

Search Folders are either active or inactive. Inactive Search Folders are displayed with italic text and transparent icons. Active Search Folders are displayed with typical font and solid icons.

The three folders “For Follow Up”, “Large Mail” – email items larger than 100KB – and “Unread Mail” are default folders which can be modified or deleted. It is important to note that deleting a Search Folder does not delete the actual email messages. Remember that Search Folders are simply views for those email messages. But if your end users delete one or more of those email messages from within a Search Folder then the actual email messages will be deleted from their original Outlook folder.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Search Folder Issues

The process of making a connection between Outlook and Exchange can sometimes be problematic. Sometimes the network is not up or the connection information for either the client or the server may have changed or become corrupted.

When unable to make a connection between the client and the server a variety of error messages can be displayed: some alone and others in combination with each other. One such error message that a user or administrator may see displayed is the following:

“Exchange is currently in recovery mode. You can either connect to your Exchange server using the network, work offline, or cancel this logon.”

There are a couple different reasons for this message as well as multiple solutions. Most of the time the error message is displayed because of a difference in the cached copies of the mailboxes stored on the local client and of the cached copies stored on the Exchange server. This problem can be resolved by disabling the cached Exchange mode on Outlook, restarting Outlook and then resetting the cached Exchange mode on Outlook back to enabled status.

The “Exchange is currently in recovery mode” can also indicate that there are configuration issues with the Domain Name System (DNS) settings. This could also be the result of a connection problem either on the client or on the server. And it could also mean that the DNS server itself is down and thus not providing name resolution services.

Continue reading How to solve the Exchange in Recovery Mode Error

One very useful feature of Exchange server is that of the Autodiscover service. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 provides a feature known as the Autodiscover service which is used to configure the user profiles of Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010 clients. Additionally it is also supported on phones running Windows Mobile 6.1 or later versions.

The Autodiscover service also allows clients to get access to the various features of Exchange server while connected. Using the user’s email address and password profile the Autodiscover service provides profile settings for Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010. It can also leverage the domain accounts of clients that are joined to domains.

Some of the benefits of using the Autodiscover service include the time savings and often cumbersome process that email Administrators had to go through when configuring user profiles manually for Exchange 2003 SP2 (or earlier) and Outloook 2003 (or earlier). Further adding to the sometimes moribund tasks that administrators have to periodically perform was also the fact that if changes or updates were made to any of the users’ profiles then the process would have to be repeated manually to reconfigure those profiles. Without these manual changes administrators would run the risk of Outlook clients no longer working in their normal manner.

Continue reading Outlook and Autodiscover Errors