The other day I was using one of my email accounts to respond to a forum that I don’t use very often. And then later in the day I needed to switch to another email account that I use to purchase products. That’s how I started thinking about the number of email accounts I use for various purposes and how often I sometimes have to switch back and forth between them.

Having multiple email accounts has been a benefit to me since it allows me to communicate  with known and unknown persons or companies using a range of identities for protection. The multiple email accounts can buffer my personal email accounts from spam and other malicious email attacks. I know many users have multiple email accounts which they keep separate from their company or organization’s email account.

It is also likely that your company or organization even encourages your end users to maintain more than one email account to serve a variety of business related purposes. In this economy there are many employees who are performing multiple tasks and have more than one business role in their company. So it is necessary for email administrators to educate their end users on how to access and manage their multiple email accounts when using one email client such as Microsoft Outlook.

In Allison Nunn’s blog, Using Outlook to Manage Multiple Email Accounts, Allison explains how to access email using the Post Office Protocol (POP3) which is used by many email clients.

In her blog post, Allison mentions a couple things to consider before setting up the email clients to access the multiple mailbox accounts:

• “All email will be delivered to one inbox unless another Outlook Data File is created for the account and a rule created to move the message to the data file. If storing all (inbound) email in one data file is acceptable then a rule can be created to move the email to a folder to keep accounts separate.”
• “When creating or replying to an email you need to select which (email account should be used to send the email). This is accomplished by selecting Accounts in the mail compose windows and selecting the account to use.”

Allison then describes how to set up additional email accounts and also offers some other tips regarding outgoing authentication and server port numbers.

Another task which an email administrator can perform is to configure Outlook to access two or more Exchange Server mailboxes from one end user’s profile. This will allow your end users to access all of their Microsoft Outlook accounts without having to log on separately to each account.

An administrator can perform the following steps to configure Microsoft Outlook 2010 such that an end user can access two or more Exchange Server mailboxes from one profile. These steps assume there are two mailbox accounts A and B on the same Exchange Server.

1. Open Outlook with the profile the profile associated with mailbox B for the Exchange Server. If validation is required then log on to the network as the user of account B.
2. From the Files menu, click Info, and then click Account Settings.
3. Click Delegate Access.
4. Click Add from the Delegates tab.
5. Select the name for the user of account A.
6. Click Add, and then click OK.
7. Click to select Editor (read, create, modify) in the Delegate Permissions dialog box and then click OK two times.
8. You may need to click Folder List on the View menu if it is not displayed.
9. Right click on Mailbox and then click Properties for the appropriate username.
10. From the Permissions tab, click Add.
11. Select the name for the user of account A.
12. Click Add, and then click OK.
13. Click on the newly added entry for account A in the name box.
14. Click on the Owner in the Permission Level box and then click OK.
15. Repeat steps 8 through 13 for all the other folders in the mailbox.
16. Exit, Log Off and the restart Windows.
17. After Windows restarts log back on as the user of account A.
18. Start Outlook with a profile for account A.
19. From the Files menu, click Info.
20. Click Account Settings.
21. From the Email tab, select the name of the account, and then click the Change icon.
22. Click the More Settings button and then the Advanced tab.
23. Click Add to add an account to the Open these additional mailboxes: list.
24. Enter the name of the user for account B.
25. Click OK three times.
26. Click Next, Finish, and then click Close.

You will now be able to view the mailbox for account B from the Folder List. Messages can now be sent as coming from account A or B be entering the name of the user in the From Field.

How to Manage Multiple Mailboxes

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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.

There are a couple of different reasons why this can happen. There is an option called, “Leave a copy of messages on the server” which if enabled can create an environment that allows duplicate emails to be downloaded. Luckily, this problem was fixed in a hotfix. That hotfix has been included as of Service Pack 2. The latest Office 2003 service pack corrects this problem.

If you’ve just installed the hotfix then you will see duplicate email messages the first time you download but the duplicate downloads will stop occurring after that initial download.

If you wish to enable the “Leave a copy of messages on the server” option then you can start by opening up the Tools menu and clicking on “E-mail Accounts”. Then click on “View or change existing e-mail accounts” and then click on Next. Locate your POP3 email account and click “Change”. You’ll next have to click on “More Settings” which will allow you to choose the “Advanced” tab. Here you will want to check mark the “Leave a copy of messages on the server” check box. Then click OK or hit the enter key.

There are other circumstances that allow for duplicate email messages to get downloaded. One such circumstance that allows this to happen is if there are multiple POP3 email accounts associated with the same profile in Outlook.  When your end user logs on to Outlook they may be prompted for their password for one of their accounts and that is the point when they will receive duplicate email messages. Those two accounts are likely pointing to the same POP3 email server which results in an end user getting duplicate emails.

You can fix this by turning off email reception for one of those accounts. Bring up Outlook and bring up the Tools menu. Locate “Send/Receive Settings” and click on “Define Send/Receive Groups”. You’ll have to determine which group contains the two POP3 email accounts. Once you know which group that is then double-click that group and under Accounts select the POP3 email account that you want to stop receiving duplicate email messages and click on it. Then clear the “Return mail items” check box. This will disable that particular email account from receiving any further emails and hence stop the duplicate emails from appearing.

Another situation that results in duplicate email messages is if the email server contains corrupt email messages in the users’ inbox. As the administrator you’ll have to check the logs for possible error messages related to corrupt email. If you determine that there are corrupt email messages on the server then you’ll have to log in to the server and delete them.

There are times when you have reinstalled the system software and also needed to reinstall Outlook. Sometimes, after an Outlook reinstall, your users will receive duplicate email messages. Other times duplicate messages may result after a user has synchronized Outlook with one of their mobile devices such as a PDA, Palm, a smart phone or other Windows mobile device.

If necessary, before any settings are changed – such as the ones mentioned above – it would be a good idea to have an end user scan and identify duplicate email messages. Obviously this is a non-productive use of their time. So having a tool in your toolbox that can scan for, identify and delete duplicate email messages can be a great time saver. There are many tools on the market that can help you with this activity.

Managing Duplicate Email Messages in Outlook

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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.

Microsoft was pushing those users affected by this change to pull down Windows Live Mail as a replacement. The changeover was expected to have occurred on June 30th of 2008. But users and administrators got a break after complaining that they wouldn’t have time to make changes to their environment in time to prevent problems. The powers that be at Microsoft agreed and delayed the changeover for another year. This gave users enough time to plan for the migration. Lucky for them, that delay was supposed to expire on June 30th, 2009 but that cutoff date was also extended, this time to September 1st, 2009. The changeover effectively discontinued Hotmail support for Outlook Express.

Windows XP was the last time that Outlook Express was included in a Windows release. That release also included the ability to support a direct Hotmail connection. But Outlook Express users have the option to change their settings such that the POP3 email protocol is used. The POP3 protocol has been supported by Hotmail since March of 2009.

Windows Vista users can still use Windows Live Mail which uses the DeltaSync protocol to connect to their Hotmail accounts. And Windows 7 users have the option to install Windows Live Mail since Windows 7 does not default to any email clients.

Some of the advantages of using Windows Live Mail are that it supports POP3 and IMAP email protocols which I have written about in previous posts.

Microsoft could have chosen to add DeltaSync support to Outlook Express but decided not to do so. Of course, users of Hotmail can still access their mail through the web interface.

Prior to the protocol change your end user may have also received error messages about not being able to access their Hotmail email via Outlook or Outlook Express due to having free Hotmail accounts.  If you need to confirm that your Outlook Express email users do not have access to Hotmail then you can do so by trying to send and receive some email messages or trying to download Hotmail folders. You can expect to get an error message such as: Unknown Error. (Yes, it’s a lot of help isn’t it?)

Clicking on “Details” should produce the details of the error message. You should see something like:
- HTTPMAIL: 10:09:18 [rx]
- HTTP/1.1 402 Access to Hotmail via Outlook & Outlook Express now requires a subscription. Please sign up at http://join.msn.com/hotmailplus/overview

And if you are using Outlook Express with Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) then you will also see another error message that says:

- “Could not connect to Hotmail as username@hotmail.com.”

“Hotmail no longer allows email access via Outlook Express for free Hotmail/MSN accounts.”

If your end users were using Outlook Express then it was recommended that they switch to Windows Live Mail. If they were using Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 then it was recommended that they use the Office Outlook Connector. The Office Outlook Connector uses Microsoft’s new DeltaSync protocol.

As the administrator you might want to take a survey or at least review your end users configurations. If you have end users who are accessing their email with the browser based version of Hotmail then you will not have any problems – unless their email configuration settings are changed.

Hotmail Access from Outlook Express Discontinued

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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.

Well, one of the errors you may encounter is when a POP3 Connector is unable to download email. The error occurs while processing the RETR command.

An example of this is using Microsoft Exchange Connector for POP3 Mailboxes to download email from individual mailboxes or from Internet Service Provider (ISP) Post Office Protocol Version 3 (POP3) mailboxes. The POP3 Connector download fails and is unable to retrieve messages. As an administrator you should review the application log for error messages. You should expect to see error messages such as:

Event ID 12050
Source: POP3Connector
“POP3: Failed to check the POP3 account for <mailbox> at host POP3.POP3Server.com on port 110. The error is 10060″ (It may also say “The error is 1232”.)

Event ID 12058
Source: POP3Connector
“POP3: There was an error processing the RETR command. The Error is 10060″
(It may also say “The Error is 1232″.)

The error messages that you see are likely caused by emails in the mailbox of the POP3 server that contain the Null character. POP3 Connector for Small Business Server 4.5 cannot download emails which contain Null characters.

The solution is to remove those email messages that contain the Null character(s) from the mailbox of the POP3 server. Once this is complete then the POP3 Connector will be able to download the remaining email messages assuming those emails do not contain any Null characters.

There are a couple different options that allow you to cleanup the POP3 server mailbox. The first option is to use another mail client such as Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. The second option is to start a telnet session to connect to the server, download the messages and then delete any emails which contain Null characters.

There are other errors you may have when using POP3 and Outlook. One such error happens when you try to connect to a POP3 server from Outlook 2007 or earlier from a Windows Vista-based computer. When you try to make the connection you are prevented from completing the action. What you are finding is that Windows Vista did not include a needed file called Msnsspc.dll. This file is needed to access MSN accounts. They might be MSN mail accounts or MSN Hotmail or even Microsoft Windows Live Mail accounts which use the POP3 protocol.

The Msnspc.dll file is needed for authentication to MSN accounts and is required to support POP3 connections. Without this file, Windows Vista users are unable to access their email using the POP3 protocol.

To fix this problem there are two options. The first option is to download the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector which will provide access to MSN accounts. You can retrieve this code from the Microsoft download web site.

Your second option is to modify the MSN POP3 account settings. After starting Outlook, open up the Tool menu and click on Email Accounts. Next click “view or change existing email accounts”. Find and verify the account you wish to change. Make sure that the Incoming mail server (POP3) field is set to “pop3.live.com” and that the Outgoing mail server (SMTP) field is set to “smtp.live.com”.

You’ll also need to check that the “My Server Requires Authentication” and “Use Same Settings as My Incoming Mail Server” are selected on the Outgoing Server tab. Finally, verify that both boxes indicate that SSL is to be used and that the incoming mail port is set to 995. Also verify that the outgoing mail port is set to 25. Click next or hit enter and you are finished. That’s it.

Revisiting the Email Protocols – Part 2

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