Outlook

Stellar Exchange Tookit Review

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Stellar Data Recovery reached out to me to see if I was interested in reviewing their product. I only accept these when I can see a personal interest in what the product does. The 5 key things this product does are:

1. Repair corrupt EDB files
2. Mailbox Extractor for Exchange Server
3. OST – PST conversion
4. Mailbox Extractor for Exchange Backup
5. Password Recovery for MS Exchange

Primarily I was interested in OST to PST conversion, as I’ve tried to do this before and had no luck with free solutions, and wanted to try a paid product that could solve the problem. (It’s also worth noting this isn’t cheap software. Also if you only want a more basic OST to PST converter, they sell that by itself for a lot less.)

I tested the Exchange Toolkit on an Outlook 2016 OST file I’d copied off another computer, that was 2GB in size. It does take a little while to process, but displays the results in a nice Outlookesque GUI:

There’s also a search function, which is handy if you’re just after a particular email from the OST.

If you need to export the results, there’s a bunch of useful options:

I was impressed with the options to export directly to Exchange Server and Office 365! But for me, I was happy with a PST. The resulting PST file was readable via Outlook 2016, so the product does exactly what it says on the virtual box.

Another part of the toolkit I looked at, was the Mailbox Extractor. Again, there’s several options, but I tried connecting to a live Exchange 2010 server to extract emails:

After connecting, again I was presented with an Outlook style of emails. I then realised there’s a few use cases for this tool that are handy to me personally; if I need to go into a mailbox to get something out, this is much easier than adding a second mailbox or profile. It also then lets me take out those emails in a variety of ways – for example, I can select a folder and then export all contents of that folder into several formats, such as PST, MSG, PDF, HTML and RTF. For HTML and PDF, it will create a file per email with the same subject name.

I can see the other functions of this product being useful for someone who’s often dealing with other companies’ data, old data that needs to be restored, or extracting out a mailbox from an online Exchange server. It’s an interesting array of tools, and I’ll try to report back on whether this tool does the job well or not.

Worth checking out these tools if you run into a scenario where you need them – sometimes there’s a freeware or open source solution, but often they don’t work, are old, unreliable or limited in functionality. Stellar Exchange Toolkit seems to do what it claims well, and I look forward to trying more features in the future.

Viewing Mbox Files On Windows

Posted on by Adam Fowler

A MBOX file is similar to a PST file, in that it contains a collection of emails. PSTs will be familiar to those of us in the Windows world, as it’s one of the old formats Outlook will use.

(Side note: PSTs are bad, but they do function well as a way of transporting a large chunk of mail from one place to another).

MBOX is the Unix version of PSTs. Google also uses this for Gmail, so if you run an export job, you’ll end up with a MBOX file. Microsoft Outlook doesn’t support this format though – so if you’re sent one, how do you view the contents?

If you start Googling, you’ll come across a bunch of ‘free’ viewers and converters. Most of these are free in the demo sense, and will only view or covert 20ish emails.

I eventually found these two free solutions and tested that they worked; if you find any others feel free to share.

 

Windows Mbox Viewer

This is a free, open source viewer of MBOX files. There’s no installer, just launch the exe, open your MBOX file and you’ll get a simple list of emails and can view the contents. Beyond being able to do searches, the program doesn’t do anything else. This is a great, simple solution if you just want to view the contents of the MBOX file. If you have Outlook installed, double clicking on an email will open it in Outlook, which can then be saved/printed.

Thunderbird

This is also completely free, from Mozilla. Here is a great set of instructions on how to configure Thunderbird to be able to read your MBOX file, but there’s a few more steps involved. Once Thunderbird can see them, you have a lot more options. The emails can be synced to another mail server, or you can simply select emails and save them out. They’ll be saved in the EML format, which Outlook will then recognise. More information about importing and exporting is available here.

 

I never found completely free software to convert from MBOX to PST, so if you really need that functionality, it might be time to take out the credit card and pay a hard working developer!

Outlook Cannot Send This Item

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Microsoft Outlook has a reasonably common, yet very generic error:

cannotNo Outlook, it was not helpful.

There are a bunch of reasons that can cause this error. Often, the ‘solution’ is to change the email from HTML to Rich Text or Plain Text, and move on. Or, copy/paste the entire email into a new email and move on. Neither of these are workarounds of course.

Dig a bit deeper on the web, and you’ll find some wackier reasons – the size of the logo in your signature for example. There was also a version of Exchange 2010 that caused the issue, but that was resolved.

I was running into this problem on a regular basis, and spent many hours trying to come up with a reason for the issue, and why only certain users had the issue, and on certain emails. I couldn’t reproduce on my own PC with the exact same emails, yet it was 100% reproducible on theirs. Also, if I removed the image from the user’s signature it fixed it – and it didn’t matter what image I put back in, it was always broken.

It wasn’t until I cried out for help on Twitter, and Christopher Kusek came to the rescue. After looking at a few other ideas, he pointed me towards hotfix KB3042197 with the lengthy title “ Graphics file attachment grows larger in the recipient’s email message after you change to a high DPI setting”

After reading this, I did some testing. Amazingly, the problem only occurred when the PC’s DPI setting was above 100%. Amazingly, when DPI is 125%, 150%, 200% etc, Word from inside Outlook resizes images in the HTML code based on your DPI setting. Some combination of HTML emails back and forth, and this resizing would cause the ‘Cannot send this item’ message.

Setting the DPI to 100% wasn’t enough either, as it would make the contents of the screen too small for some users. The registry setting mentioned on the KB article ‘DontUseScreenDpiOnOpen’ and setting the value to 1 (true) actually fixed it!

After some more testing, this single registry setting which you’d think would be on by default was rolled out, and the ‘Cannot send this item’ messages were no longer appearing. At least not for this particular problem!

TLDR: If Windows is set to > 100% DPI, the MS Word editor inside Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 will resize images by default and this can cause weird stuff to happen.

Outlook Patch KB2956128 Breaks Profile Changing (and KB3054881)

Posted on by Adam Fowler

With Outlook 2010, I have profiles automatically created*. This means a user can just launch Outlook for the first time with all their account settings populated. The flow on effect of this is that from the Mail control panel program, clicking Add will also auto-populate the account using our email server and the signed in user’s email address.

outlook2

Once the new profile was created, you can normally go to Properties > Email Accounts > Change – from there, you can enter a different user’s name and use their Exchange account instead (assuming you have permission). This is handy for people who need secondary profiles for Outlook for whatever reason, or for Admins.

outlook

Except, now I can’t change the account from my own. The User Name field for the Change Account window is greyed out! It never used to be. After doing some digging around, assuming some policy must have changed I finally worked out that the latest update for Outlook had caused this.

The culprit is KB2956128, the February 10, 2015 update for Outlook 2010. After removing this update from my PC, the field was no longer greyed out and can now be changed.

outlook3

Another weird effect of this patch was that one of the profiles disappeared when it was installed, then reappeared after the patch was removed.

My guess is that this problem stems from the listed issue being fixed, but I’m only guessing:

February 10, 2015 update for Outlook 2010 (KB2956128)

    • Although you deploy the Microsoft Outlook 2010 policy Prevent copying or moving items between accounts (registry entry DisableCrossAccountCopy), Outlook 2010 still lets certain user rules to move or copy organization email messages to an Outlook Data (.pst) file or another email account.

 

There are some other grumblings about this patch breaking addins, OCS crashing, password prompts and search functionality on public folders. I didn’t see my particualr issue mentioned though… here’s a few links:

http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2voun5/patch_tuesday_kb2956128_breaks_mailexpress/

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2884204/patch-management/users-report-that-kb-2956128-is-causing-outlook-failures.html

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/af1df139-e8f4-4950-9f6d-147e21c40f92/ol2010search-problems-after-install-kb2956128?forum=outlook

The worrying part of this is it seems to be yet another patch that’s causing issues in the Microsoft world. They haven’t had a very good run of patches lately, when a year ago a bad patch was surprising. Let’s hope they start testing these more thoroughly again.

* Update 6th March 2015 – I just wanted to clarify that in my work environment, we are pushing settings that force the auto creation of a profile. If you’re not doing this then you’re probably not affected as much by this particular issue because you’ll be prompted for the details such as Exchange Server and Email address, but there’s still several weird issues that have arisen from this patch – so either hold off or do extra testing on this one!

* Update 11th August 2015 – I’ve now noticed that a new update KB3054881 replaces KB2956128, and also breaks this functionality. Uninstalling the update immediately fixes it.

* Update 26th August – KB3055041 replaces the last KB, and still breaks it. I’m going to guess any future Outlook 2010 updates break this.

 

 

LinkedIn for Outlook Social Connector Discontinued

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Today I received the following notice from LinkedIn:

Hi Adam,

As an active user of LinkedIn for Microsoft Outlook Social Connector, we wanted to make sure we let you know that on March 9, we will no longer support LinkedIn for Microsoft Outlook Social Connector in Outlook 2003, 2007, and 2010. This means that LinkedIn information about your email contacts will not be visible in those Outlook versions.
Our team is working with Microsoft to build even more powerful tools to help you stay connected with your professional world. Until then you can get similar capabilities with the “LinkedIn for Outlook” app for Outlook 2013 from the Office Store.
Have questions? Visit our Help Center for more information..
Thanks,
The LinkedIn Team

That’s 6 days notice (although probably seven since I’m going to assume it’s US March 9) for discontinuing a product. I’ve had a brief look around and can’t find any other information around this, apart from a similar message on LinkedIn’s website.

LinkedIn appear to be pushing their new app called LinkedIn for Outlook, which is only supported by Outlook 2013 or Outlook Online. That doesn’t help those of us that can’t run Outlook 2013 for legacy reasons (plugins being the main culprit here!).

One note is worth pointing out on the decomissing of the product taken from LinkedIn’s website:

  • Any contact information that you have locally synced in Outlook will remain in Outlook, but it will no longer be updated.

Does this mean the plugin will continue without erroring, showing cached information? This can be a gotcha for people running it either at home, or in a corporate environment. I’ve reached out to LinkedIn on Twitter, so we’ll see if they respond:

 

Quick Update: Wes Miller has pointed out that this could be due to LinkedIn API changes, locking down most things.

Update 11th March 2015 – I’ve had LinkedIn help respond. Looks like it’s time to uninstall that addon before users are affected!