Adventures in Outlook
Background
I recently joined a fabulous new company, but my email was located on 2 different machines. I have 4 different email accounts I access on a regular basis. Email hell.
When I joined the new company I received 2 new computers to use. One workstation for doing 3D graphics demonstrations and 1 little laptop primarily focused on email use.
This story describes how I optimized my setup and transferred my settings over to the new machine.
Ok first off; .pst files, these mammoth files are the usual place Outlook stores everything about your mail. If your a canny user, you’ll probably already store these on a disk other than your system disk. This gives you better performance and should windows need to be completely wiped and reinstalled, you can easily point your fresh install to the files on the other disk. If your even cannier you might have an archive pst file that all mails older than say 3 months get moved to. This helps performance.I personally use D:/Email/Blabla.pst and an archive.pst that pushes 90days old emails to so the original .pst doesn’t get too large.
Of course if you use pop3 and download all your messages you really should backup these files regular otherwise if your hard disk dies, you lose all your email. Some people prefer imap for this reason which keeps all your mails on the server (based on the assumption that servers are more stable and robust and more frequently backed up than desktops this makes sense.
So not having travelled lately on business, my files lived on a desktop I used for website design. All of a sudden I needed to be on a plane to Munich and I needed to take my email with me. So I copied the relevant .pst files over to my old laptop. Added the folders in Outlook options and voila – email tastic! A little folder heavy but at least I had what I needed.
The frustrating thing about doing this is you lose one of Outlooks great little features… the autofill predictor. You know when you really need to email Andy, but you can’t remember his address, or his surname or his company, but you just type ‘A-n’ in the to field and voila up pops Andy’s email address.
No problemo, as we are clever devils a quick Google leads us to understanding that this functionality depends on a little file that ends .NK2 that lives in your ‘%appdata%/Microsoft/Outlook/’ folder.
In addition if you have a little time, and want to be a little sadistic on your poor hard disk, it might be a good idea to move all your emails into one folder so you have only one pst to backup.
Just drag the email in Outlook from one folder to another to streamline your little emailing space. Don’t forget your sent items! and drafts… and calendar… etc.
If you have an old version of a pst, this is also one way to convert it to the new unicode compatible .pst that exists in the latest versions of outlook, great if your new chinese penpal is sending you mandarin lessons!
So that’s about it really, get everything into one file, ensure you back it up, and also back up your NK2 file too if you just love autofill.
