Microsoft Outloo…
I had quite a frustrating time today with some email. Microsoft Outlook keeps its messages in some kind of database file. This is not quite as horrible as Exchange’s data store, which is basically impossible for normal people to back up and restore. But it does manage to get corrupted, and I’m told it gets quite unstable over 2G or so.
Well today I had to get some mail out of some old Outlook .pst files. Upon starting Outlook, MS Office wanted to install itself as it often does for the first run on a virgin user account, and it then failed because it needed the MS Office CD. So on another computer I found that the .pst files were corrupt. Some googling revealed that Office ships with a repair tool usually located at C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MapiC3\Scanpst.exe, or something like that. It was able to repair the files (woohoo!), but the required emails weren’t in them. I also rediscovered the joy of opening .pst files and having no indication of which file matches which “Personal Folders”.
Upon returning to my computer, I found that Outlook had managed to get past the CD impasse and was showing the following screen:
Outloo, a perfect description of my feelings towards that annoying program.
Posted Thursday, February 3, 2011