Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint & Mobile PDA Blog » Outlook Tips

Before You Delete that Exchange Mailbox – Back it Up!

Matthew Palis — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:57:24 +0000

With the new year upon us many of us are cleaning house for the new year and getting the business loose ends tied up to launch ahead into 2009 with a vengeance!

With this in mind many companies experience adds moves and changes of employees. If you are the person in charge of managing your companies email and your company uses Hosted Microsoft Exchange Mailboxes you will want to be careful deleting mailboxes. Outlook mailboxes hold much more information than just email these days. Deleting a mailbox will remove all that persons contacts, calendar, tasks and notes as well as their entire email history.

So be careful and backup that mailbox before you deleted it. I know with great certainty that hosted exchange providers have to charge a fee to recover a deleted mailbox due to the fact that it is a time consuming activity for them. For instructions on backing up your mailbox into a .pst file please click on the how to article link below.

HOWTO: Export your data from Outlook

Hope this helps and saves you some time, money & potential headaches!

Speeding up Outlook with Exchange Cache Mode

Matthew Palis — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:44:50 +0000

Microsoft has done an incredible job over the past 4 years increasing performance of Outlook on an Exchange server. In older versions of Outlook and Exchange every time you changed folders or opened an item in Outlook it would have to request that item or list of items from the server directly. This made Outlook very slow if you had any network or Internet issues and made accessing Outlook data when you were not on-line impossible. So much for working on the plane!

Well now things are much different. When you configure Outlook to run in Cache Mode (which is really easy to do and a default setting for newer versions of Outlook) not only can you access your Outlook Data when you are off-line but it also speeds up Outlook considerably.

What is Cache Mode?

It is a simple concept really. What Outlook does in cache mode is it keeps a copy of all your Outlook data on your computer and makes sure that copy is always in sync with your mailbox on the Hosted Exchange Server. So when you change folders or open an item it does all this looking at the copy on your computer instead of having to go over the Internet or network to get it from the server every time.

How do I get Cache mode to work on my pc?

If you want to make sure you are running in cache mode or want to know how it is done - watch the quick 2 minute video below.

Video – Outlook Cache Mode

Recovering Email that has been Deleted from “Deleted Items” Folder

Matthew Palis — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:05:24 +0000

Many people believe that once they delete an email from their “Deleted Items” folder in Outlook or empty their “Deleted Items” folder that those emails are gone forever. Well if you used Outlook on a POP account that statement would be true. Since most of us used Outlook on POP accounts for so long many of us who are now on a Microsoft Exchange server don’t even know it has a handy feature called “Recover Deleted Items.”

Before I go into how to use this very simple feature of Exchange and Outlook let me state that each exchange server can have a different policy set-up for how long the server will keep the items you removed from your “Deleted Items” folder. Currently the servers at Link2Exchange retain them for our customers for a period of 72 hours. Other hosted exchange providers or in-house IT departments will have different policies for how long they retain those messages for you.

Now on to the fun part.. how can I get back that important email I lost when I emptied my “Deleted Items” folder?

First you need to open Outlook. Then click on you deleted items folder. Then click on the “Tools” menu and select “Recover Deleted Items” from the menu. Below is a screen shot of this step.

The next screen that pops up will show all the items that have been deleted that you can “Recover.” You will notice that you can sort the messages by “Subject”, “Deleted On”, “From” or “Received” fields. This can make it easier to find the message you are looking for. There is also a button at the top to “Select All” the messages and a button to “Recover Selected Items.” so the next step to recover your important email is to find the email and select it then click the “Recover Selected Items” button at the top.

Next navigate to your deleted items and look for the email you just recovered…pretty sweet huh? I bet quite a few business people have thanked the Microsoft Gods for adding that handy feature.

If you are not already an Exchange user I encourage you to give one of our Hosted Microsoft Exchange Mailboxes a try – we offer a 30 Day Free Trial.

(: Just can’t resist a little guiltless self promotion once in a while

View Multiple Time Zones in Outlook Calendar

Matthew Palis — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:54:42 +0000

Do you have a need to view multiple times zones at once in your Outlook Calendar?

Here is a little tip on how to make Outlook show you the times on your calendar for two time zones in the same view – it’s quite handy and reduces confusion especially if one time zone uses daylight savings and another may not throughout the year.

Not to mention they recently changed the dates for when DST begins and ends. Hopefully we are saving some energy as I know it confused a ton of people over the past 12 months (many of which missed important appointments because of it)….oops I digress..back to the instructions on how to use this nifty Outlook feature.

First click to view your calendar. Then be sure that you are in day or week view. You will see the hours of the day listed in the left. Right click anywhere on the left where the hours of the day are listed. Then select “Change Time zone”. On the next screen check the check box “Show an additional time zone” Then below it select the additional time zone you want to see. You can label each one as well by entering whatever you want to call each one in the “Label” field.

Then simply click “OK” as your last step and now you can view two timezones in your calendar at once.

Simple and handy isn’t it?