You Ain’t Got Mail
There is an old saying “Do as I Say, Not as I Do” and I am ashamed to say that though I tell people what is “good practice” I usually find that I don’t have time to live my life the same way. I do tell people to keep their firewalls up and their anti-spyware software updated and to run it frequently and do so myself but when it comes to compacting mail folders and backing up important data I am a bad boy.
Despite many colleagues sneering and telling me that I should be using Outlook rather than Outlook Express I have been true to OE. On my laptop I use Thunderbird which I consider to be much better than Outlook Express, but since most of my emails are in Outlook Express on my tower, I leave the copies on the server until I download them into OE. In an average day I receive somewhere between 50 and 150 emails coming into three accounts. A lot of these emails are copies of correspondence from protonic.com. I also get special offer updates, Dilbert, the Spanish Word of the Day, adverts, junk mail, spam, phishing emails on behalf of banks which don’t even exist in the UK etc etc. It all builds up and fills the Inbox to bursting point.
Although protonic.com keeps a copy of all my ticket answers I keep a copy in Outlook Express so that I can search rapidly then copy and paste rather than retype everything. However, rather than allow Outlook Express to handle the Store Folder location I have all emails on a slave drive partition, this allows me to swap the primary hard drive so that I can work in XP or 98 and still access my emails. I told myself, back in November that it was time that I made a DVD backup of all my email folders again. November turned to December and we arrived at Christmas Eve.
The Inbox loads slowly when it is full so I decided to do a bit of a clean up. I used the Find function in OE to list emails containing certain words in the Subject field then deleted the results. I searched again using specific phrases in emails and deleted the results. I repeated this for some senders in the From field. The Deleted Items folder swelled up, the Inbox slimmed down and then everything stopped. During one of the searches the process ground to a halt, Outlook Express locked up and there was nothing I could do except restart the computer. After the restart I opened OE to find that all emails received after September 5th were missing. I navigated to the email store folder and found that the Inbox date and time stamp were from just before the crash. I tinkered for a while but got nowhere. After shouting at the dog and kicking my wife I had a coffee and a think. I installed Thunderbird on the desktop machine and allowed it to import all my emails and settings during the installation. I started Thunderbird and, lo and behold, there were all my missing emails. So do I now use Thunderbird only, use both and lose several gigabytes of space to all the emails which now exist in both Outlook Express and Thunderbird or put it off until another day? When I have more time I will make that decision, after all, nothing is spoiling at the moment…..
There are times when we all put off doing the tasks we find to be real chores. I’m going to back up my email folders onto DVD as soon as I finish this blog. I’ll make the decision on the emails client eventually but I now have another possible technique for the possible rescue of missing emails in Outlook Express. Good advice comes free at protonic.com but having been given it you then have to put it into practice. Now where do I find a self-discipline download?
