A very Useful link on understandin pop3 or imap login strings has been posted which will help. I can work my way around pop3 and smtp but knew nothing about imap. I’ve spent the best part of two days struggling to get our Exchange server back on the internet and working again and I’ll document more about this on Monday. Basically we ended up with not being able to email other Azur or K3 sites but could email everyone else….then I went in and cleaned up Active Directory and couldn’t email anything out unless I kept stopping and starting the smtp server. In the end I deleted and recreated our smtp routing connector and everything worked – just when we were starting to discuss reinstalling exchange 2000 – NOT a nice thing to contemplate at lunchtime on Friday afternoon.

From a technical mailing list I received today, apparently if your PST file goes over 2GB then it will get corrupted. However, Microsoft offers a tool that truncates oversized PST and OST files so you can recover at least some of the information in the folder. Commonly referred to as the “Crop Tool,” this file is now available from the Microsoft’s Exchange 2000 Tool: PST2GB Web page. Although this won’t ensure full recovery of all the data, it may help to recover *some* data.

The MS Exchange Blog has a useful tip on The Exchange 2000 MAILQ Utility which I duly implemented this afternoon. It took me a while to realise why I was getting hundreds of popup messages on the server for almost every line of code. This was because I hadn’t read the instructions and had double clicked on go.wsf instead of dropping to a dos prompt and running cscript go.wsf
The end result looks good though – now I need to work out how to add this into a dashboard type shell thing I can have on my pc. There are so many small website bits and pieces scattered everywhere that really need putting into a status web page.
The other annoying thing is that you need to use IE to view the resulting output page 🙁

Outlook Shutdown Addin from daveswebsite.com may be useful for getting rid of outlook as it often stays around. Personally though I’d try and work out why it stays in memory.

Will asked me about this Administrator Information About the Outlook E-mail Security Update article on Microsoft’s Knowledge base. I’d never heard of this functionality within outlook – I’ve seen the effects of installing sp1 on office, which gives a similar dialog box, but not heard about it being centrally controlled. One for the memory I think!

I solved my Calendar issues with Outlook 2k3 this morning. Not sure exactly what the solution was, but by logging onto a downlevel client (98 with office 2000) and then logging into my mailbox as me AND changing permissions for one user from reviewer to author (which I needed to do anyway) I then found that everyone else can now view the calendar….and its only taken 15 days to crack it. Now the annoying thing is that I don’t know what caused it or which of the two things fixed it.

Someone blogged about Alain Lissoir who seems to be is a scripting guru.He has a couple of interesting articles, with scripts, for managing Exchange Server 2000 (of interest to me) and also quite a few for w2k3 and exchangew2k3

Apparently since I upgraded my desktop pc to outlook 2k3, most of the users in the office have been unable to view my calendar, but get a message “unable to display the folder” and a grey screen. They used to be able to open it, and can access everyone elses calendar. The weird thing is that one person can open it, but they are using service release 1 of office 2000 – everyone else is not service packed (because of the annoying “do you really want to send this message” when automatic macros kick in). In the meantime, I’m enjoying the privacy which leads me to wonder if outlook didn’t have the private button functionality would it break privacy laws where employee’s can expect privacy? It would be interesting to see if outlook 97 is still able to read private events in the calendar (which it used to be able to do)

I got the Microsoft Exchange Server reported error (0x80040600) : ‘Unknown Error 0x80040600’. again today. Sure enough, deleting the messages in deleted items cleared the problem. When I then did a F9 synch 18 messages suddenly appeared in deleted items. Cleared those too.

Thanks to MS Exchange Blog : Holiday Reading… I’ve seen an application, ChooseFrom that sits on exchange that looks at the “send replies to” field at emails and sets that address as the FROM address in emails, thus allowing exchange users to send mails from other email address’s. Useful for sending posts to mailing lists when you’ve subscribed the list to a public folder. Unfortunately I doubt our company will fork up the $150 to use it on our mail server 🙁
He also explains why outlook web access asks you to insert the office 2000 cd (like you are going to have THAT handy) – apparently it’s documented in technet articles 257886 and 298110
Oh, and there sounds like an almost ideal job vacancy too.