skylark53

My boss wants me to send a colleague, Derek, some materials. So he needs to send me Derek's email address. He looked in his Contacts but Derek is not listed there. So he began an email to him by writing "Derek" in the To: line. Outlook obligingly filled in the rest. Boss then scooped this up with his mouse. He pasted it into an open email to me but instead of putting derek@hisemailprovider.com, Outlook translated this email address into the bloke's name. How can he get Derek's email address into a message to me? Thanks! We're going mad here... and Derek stil doesn't have his docs.

We need to reduce the size of our Outlook pst file and have begun experimenting with Archive. It looks like a promising solution except that archive files created by a particular person (in their own mailbox) appear to be visible only to that person. There are three of us in the office who all have full permission on each other's mailboxes, and who all need to be able to see each other's archives. Is there any way to set this up, for example on the server (running Mcrosoft Small Business Server and Exchange Server)? I can find no way of doing it within Outlook on our desktop PCs. Cheers.

Apparently it's some sort of security thing, added after composition by the sender's server, and intended to be undeletable. Anyone feel challenged by this? PM me if you have a solution you don't want to share here.

I recently received email from a local council, containing a page-long disclaimer notice at the bottom. It is policy in our office when forwarding messages to remove footers, signatures, disclaimers, taglines, images, copies of previous mail exchanges, etc, wherever possible, to save paper & carbon emissions when messages must be printed. When I forwarded this mail to others in my office, I was relieved to see that the text was not present and therefore did not need to be deleted. To my dismay, however, the forwarded copies contained the long, ugly disclaimer. So does the printed copy I made for our files. The "hidden text " box is ticked when I invoke Word 2003 to forward mail. But nothing appears; the disclaimer is invisible. There is also no attachment to the message. So my question is, how was this text piggybacked into the mail, and what can be done to remove it on forwarding or printing? Thanks for any suggestions. for info: we use Outlook 2003 on Windows XP Pro, SP3.

I would check the virtual memory allocation on this machine (either for Word or per task). Word with anything in it uses a phenomenal amount of memory (far larger than the size of the embedded object). I had a similar problem with a Word file that had a lot of images in it, whether or not the images had been compressed. Changing the virtual memory settings did fix it. Furthermore, once this had been done, and I had pasted in replacement copies of the images that were corrupt / would not display, the size of the Word file decreased significantly. And the file was fine, both on the screen and when printed out.

Just spent 2 hours recovering from an Outlook Express (OE) disaster. I think it’s all OK now but this wasn't how I'd planned to spend my Saturday afternoon. I want never, ever to go there again, and that means understanding what went wrong, so that I can avoid it in the future. If you read this and you have any ideas, please, please tell me. Thanks! For historical reasons I have several OE ‘message stores’. Let’s call my current store “store 2” and the old one “store 1”. So when I fired up OE today, it was using store 2. I’m accustomed to moving between the stores, via Tools\Options\Maintenance\Store folder. I instruct OE to start using store 1, and it reports it’s found some files there; do I want to use them? I say “yes”. This stops OE deleting the contents of store 1 and moving the contents of store 2 into it. As I say, I've done it many times, always without difficulty. So far so good. I re-opened OE and worked on the messages I needed to view. Then I reset the store to store 2, closed and re-opened OE. Some time later, on a whim, I navigated to store 1, wondering whether it could be merged into the current store. And immediately I could see that something was wrong: I spotted some folders I knew I’d created only recently, and long after I had last used this store (February). Worried, I checked a couple of the corresponding folders in OE and they were empty. I went straight to store 2 and saw to my dismay that although all the dbx files seemed to be there, many were of size 75kb - the size of an file containing no messages. Which dbx files were they? They were all the ones with names beginning 0-9 and A-F. Everything higher in the alphabet was fine. A quick check of file size in store 1 revealed that these files had been moved there. Everything I know about Outlook Express suggests this is impossible. I painstakingly checked each of my 100 or so OE folders, noting which ones were empty and copying the appropriate dbx files back from store 1 into store 2. When I fired up OE again, to my relief all my mail messages were present. So I seem to have recovered, but it absolutely was not fun and I don’t like it when inexplicable things happen.

Thanks, Jaclaz, I appreciate your suggestions. However, this is not a .doc file, it's .wbk. This is the problem. There are lots of text extractors (including Word's own "recover text from any file", which failed) which do often work on .doc etc, but not with .wbk. I tried the text extractor you recommended but it immediately says .wbk is not a recognised file type. Sky

Thanks, Allen, I appreciate your help - but this is not a .doc file.

Had been editing a doc with Word 2003 for about 3 hours when we had a power cut & computer went down. I went through the recovery procedure recommended at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/827099, but none of these steps succeeded. However, in the recycling bin I found a file with the right time, called ~WRA4072.wbk - evidently a ‘workbook’ file. This file cannot be opened using the procedure in Method 2: Search for Word backup files – the error is “Word experienced an error trying to open this file”. I was also unable to open it using the “Recover text from any file” option. I eventually managed to open the .wbk file using Wordpad. Along with a lot of unprintable characters it does contain some text - but it is the original text from the beginning of the edit. The changes you've made must somehow be stored in the 'gobbledegook'. So my question is, is there any way of recovering the edited text from this .wbk file? I really, really don’t want to have to input all this work again. Thanks! Sky

Had been editing a doc with Word 2003 for about 3 hours when we had a power cut & computer went down. I went through the recovery procedure recommended at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/827099, but none of these steps succeeded. However, in the recycling bin I found a file with the right time, called ~WRA4072.wbk - evidently a ‘workbook’ file. This file cannot be opened using the procedure in Method 2: Search for Word backup files – the error is “Word experienced an error trying to open this file”. I was also unable to open it using the “Recover text from any file” option. I eventually managed to open the .wbk file using Wordpad. Along with a lot of unprintable characters it does contain some text - but it is the original text from the beginning of the edit. The changes you've made must somehow be stored in the 'gobbledegook'. So my question is, is there any way of recovering the edited text from this .wbk file? I really, really don’t want to have to input all this work again. Thanks! Sky