Here’s a quick Outlook tip!   When you open an email with pictures, or view an attachment, the picture is first saved to a temporary folder so that it can be scanned for viruses.

It appears however that this folder can become full – which means that you can no longer view images in emails.   Instead, you’ll just see a red cross where the picture should be.

There’s apparently a limit of 100 on the number of files with the same name, so for example

image001(01).jpg

image001(02).jpg

etc..

The easy fix is to just clear this folder out periodically as it’s not automatically emptied.

The folder can be found here (using Windows XP as an example):

For Outlook 2000 to 2003:
C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLK*.

For Outlook 2007:
C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.Outlook\

If you’re having trouble opening an Outlook PST file and it is around 2GB in size, you’re probably hitting an old legacy limit.   

Older versions of Outlook had this as a set limit due to constraints based around the FAT file system used at the time.   It appears some Outlook related tools still have this limit.

The situation here is that we’ve just run a restore of an old PST file (dated 2008) which is 2,112,536,576 Bytes.    Now although this file was created using Outlook, it now appears that Outlook is unable to open it as it’s corrupt.

Fine – we can use scanpst.exe (inbox repair tool) to repair it?   Nope…    It appears that the file is around 25MB over the limit that scanpst.exe can handle!   The last error in the logfile to signify this is “80040834″ (obvious error!)

In a bizarre twist – MS have released a tool which will shrink the PST file to a size compatible with scanpst.   The only drawback is that the tool basically “DELETES” 25MB of the mailbox to shrink it’s size!!

Yup, you read that correct.   The scanpst from Microsoft, can’t read the mailbox created by Outlook (from Microsoft) without deliberately deleting valuable data!

At least in this case the resulting mailbox had the necessary emails the client was looking for.

Just make sure if you generate .pst exports – you keep the size under 2GB

Here’s a link to the tool which “compacts” the pst file for you:

PST2GB

Just had to change a user account name in Active Directory due to a user getting married.   All pretty straightforward, however after several hours, the change hadn’t appeared in the global address list in Outlook, so I thought I’d look into it.

Here are the steps necessary to prompt the change to happen sooner:

1) In Exchange System Manager, go to the offline address list, right click and select Rebuild

2) In Outlook – go to send/receive and select Download Address Book

You should now see the new name appear in the contact list.

If you’re getting this error message pop up when starting Outlook, try the following fix:

Windows XP

Start – Run; Outlook.exe /resetnavpane

Windows Vista, Windows 7

Start – tyoe outlook.exe /resetnavpane

I also found a reference to the same error on the MS knowledgebase, however the fix was to remove the profile and recreate it, which didn’t help fix the error.