Email administration should be just one of the duties of a typical administrator for any large company. Most often email administration is performed by network administrators and sometimes by operating system administrators. Most day to day email administration consists of pretty routine activities.

However, you’ll sometimes find yourself with a never before seen problem. One such problem is that of duplicate emails. Thankfully, this is an infrequent occurrence.

Email inboxes use up a lot of space as it is and having limits on the amount of inbox space a user can use can be helpful as an alert mechanism for spotting trouble with duplicate email messages. A lot of duplicate emails can use up a lot of space and fill up your end users’ inboxes almost overnight. And these duplicate email messages can certainly cause confusion and negatively impact a company’s productivity.

Some administrators have noticed this problem when they’ve downloaded email messages using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 from a POP3 (Post Office Protocol) email server and then on their next download they notice that duplicate email messages have been downloaded as well.

Continue reading Managing Duplicate Email Messages in Outlook

You may already know about this recent Outlook Express change but if you don’t then it’s not too late to read about it.

If any of your end users come to you and complain that they can’t read their email then one of the questions you should ask them is if they are trying to access any of their Hotmail account(s) through Outlook Express. You should also check to see if any error messages are being generated when your end users try to access their email.

This year Microsoft changed their protocol that Hotmail was using – which was the Distributed Authoring and Versioning (DAV) protocol – to a protocol called DeltaSync. The DAV protocol has been used for many years and Microsoft wanted to update their protocol stack to include the newer DeltaSync protocol which is better at supporting large email inboxes. DAV was the protocol that Outlook Express and a handful of older clients used to access Hotmail .The newer protocol, DeltaSync, enables email clients the ability to download only the changes that were made since the last synch operation. The DAV protocol instead would pull down everything.

Continue reading Hotmail Access from Outlook Express Discontinued

Previously I discussed the various email protocols which support the sending and receiving of emails. One those protocols is the Post Office Protocol version3 (POP3) protocol. In this article I will discuss some of the potential POP errors you may receive when using POP3 clients, such as Microsoft Outlook, and email servers such as Microsoft Exchange.

Remember that the Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) allows email client software such as Outlook and Outlook Express to retrieve email from a remote server.  The Outlook client accesses only its own server inbox and cannot access other inboxes on the server nor can it read public or private folders also on the server. POP3 is not intended to provide full manipulation of e-mail on the server.

Email messages are usually downloaded and then deleted from the server. But there is an option to leave temporary copies of the emails on the server and have them removed after a certain amount of time has expired. Once the emails are downloaded the user can take actions against those messages without needing to be connected to the server. After syncing back up with the server, email can then be sent using Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). The email server functions like a U.S. Post Office. It is a temporary storage area until email reaches its final destination – another POP3 client.

Continue reading Revisiting the Email Protocols – Part 2