Exchange Messaging Outlook
Volume 6, Number 18

Greetings! Welcome to Vol. 6, No. 18, 19 December 2001, of Exchange Messaging Outlook, a biweekly newsletter about Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook.

• It's that holiday time again!
• More on Office XP Service Pack 1
• Another Farewell: MyVisto
• Overcome Email Overload tip: Move mail out of the Inbox quickly
• Code to remove categories on Outlook messages
• Sue Mosher on the air with Jesse Berst

Regular features:

• New utilities
• Updated utilities
• Other new resources

It's that holiday time again!

It's that time of year again -- time to make sure everyone in your organization knows when the official company holidays will take place in 2002. Outlook 98 users are also finding out that their list of holidays imported into Outlook ends with 2001.

At http://copernico.mty.itesm.mx/~tempo/juliodocs/OUTLOOK.TXT, you'll find a list of holidays for countries from Argentina through Venezuela and several major religions for the years 1997-2006. You will need to replace the Outlook.txt file on your system with this file. For Outlook 2002, you'll need to change the name to Outlook.hol, replacing the existing Outlook.hol on your system. Then follow the instructions in the MSKB article http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q161389. Note that this file may duplicate holidays you already have; you may want to remove holidays from the Calendar first or plan to use the method described at http://www.slipstick.com/calendar/holidaydupes.htm.

If you're more concerned about just those official company holidays, check out our Transmit Holidays custom Outlook form at http://www.slipstick.com/dev/olforms/holiday.htm. Once you publish this form to the Organization Forms library on Exchange Server, you can use it to send a message with a button users can click to add specific holidays to their Calendar folder. The form will read the holidays out of a calendar folder you specify.

You can use this form for more than holidays, too, such as for distributing a list of meetings that don't fit a normal recurrence pattern.

One note on publishing the form: Make sure the "Send form definition with item" box on the (Properties) page in design mode is *not* checked and that you answer No if Outlook prompts you whether you want to check that box. Otherwise, the form's code will not run on machines with the Outlook Email Security Update, Office 2000 SP-2, or Outlook 2002.

We wish you the very best for this holidays and hope you get off to a great start in 2002!

More on Office XP Service Pack 1

Outlook MVP Ken Slovak has updated his Attachment Security & Options COM add-in for Outlook 2002 to add a checkbox that lets you easily enable the new Read as Plain Text feature to avoid HTML content in messages. The update also handles the three additional blocked file types in SP1. You can download the new version from http://www.slipstick.com/addins/gallery/index.htm#attopts. If you had a previous version installed, you must remove it before installing the latest version.

After you install the add-in, go to Tools | Options | Attachment Security & Options to set your attachment blocking and Read as Plain preferences. You can also choose to have Outlook minimize to the Windows system tray.

We had planned to bring you more information on the apparent fix for forms cache corruption in SP1, but we just haven't had time to test that yet.

Another Farewell: MyVisto

In EMO two weeks ago, we reported that the MyPalm portal (http://my.palm.com), which offered a web-based solution to synchronizing Outlook across several devices, will discontinue its PIM services and delete data as of January 10. MyVisto.com is also shutting down. It will close Dec. 21 -- this Friday -- and delete all user data. Visto users can either use the MyVisto Assistant tool to migrate their data or the migration tools provided by the FastMail web-based mails service. For more information, see http://www.emailaddresses.com/vistohelp.html.

Overcome Email Overload tip: Move mail out of the Inbox quickly

Today I will show how to put a button in your toolbar to move selected messages out of your Inbox, thus keeping only your active messages in your Inbox. While dragging and dropping one message doesn't take a lot of time, it adds up when you do it 80 times per day, five days per week, 50 weeks per year.

Ideally, you'd like to move messages with one click. While Outlook doesn't have any built-in capability to do that, you can do that with some simple macros, available at http://www.OvercomeEmailOverload.com/outlook/OEOmacros.html.

Installing the macro can take five minutes, but it isn't difficult. There are instructions on that Web page on how to installing the macros.

Once you load the macros, you can put a button in the toolbar to move any selected messages to the folder "zz-Done".

To customize your toolbar:

• Select Tools | Customize
• Choose Macros from the Categories list in the window that appears
• Select the MoveToDone macro from the right-hand list and drag it to the toolbar. If the icon gets a little "X" in it, move it to the left until the X goes away.
• Click on the Close button.

Note that included in my macro package is one for moving to the next message. If you put the MessageDown macro in your toolbar next to the MoveToDone macro, then you can keep your mouse hovered over those two buttons. When you finish reading a message, click on the MoveToDone macro button if you are done with it. Click on the MessageDown button if you will have to come back to the message later.

These two macros should significantly reduce the distance your mouse will travel!

**** This tip is adapted from _Overcome Email Overload with Microsoft Outlook 2000 and Outlook 2002_ by Kaitlin Duck Sherwood. Find out more at http://www.OvercomeEmailOverload.com/outlook/

Code to remove categories on Outlook messages

If you used Kaitlin's earlier EMO tip on using categories to manage your messages, you might get an occasional message from your email correspondents wondering why they got a message with the category a-family or z-work. When you reply to or forward a message, Outlook copies the categories from the original message to the reply or forward. You can put this simple code in the ThisOutlookSession module to strip categories from all outgoing messages:

Private Sub Application_ItemSend(ByVal Item As Object, _

                                       Cancel As Boolean)

  Item.Categories = ""

End Sub

This and Kaitlin's tip above are just a few examples of what you can to with Visual Basic for Applications in Outlook to automate your mail and other chores. If you want to learn more about Outlook VBA, start at http://www.slipstick.com/dev/vb.htm.

Sue Mosher on the air with Jesse Berst

I'll be talking about Outlook on two upcoming "BerstAlert on Tech Success" programs on the Business Talk Radio network. On Wednesday, Dec. 26, at 9 p.m. EST, we'll be talking about Outlook secrets and customization and whether you should upgrade to Outlook 2002. Then on Wednesday, Jan. 9, at 9 p.m. EST, the show will focus on Outlook troubleshooting.

New Utilities

EASYRECOVERY FILEREPAIR
http://www.ontrack.com/filerepair/
The Microsoft Outlook component repairs both .pst and .ost files, recovering data that Scanpst.exe may not be able to recover. Also repairs files that exceed the 2GB limit and accesses password-protected files.

HUSHMAIL PROFESSIONAL
http://www.hush.com/solutions/hushmail_professional/
Encryption and digital signature tool for Outlook 2000 interoperable with other PGP mail applications.

I'M INTOUCH
http://www.01com.com/prod_iit.htm
Get access to Outlook messages, contacts, and appointments via any Internet-connected wireless device. Also provides remote access to files on your PC and allows you to send messages using those files as attachments.

LOUDPC
http://www.loudpc.com
Real-time access to Outlook data via browser, WAP phone, PDA or Blackberry. You can view, create, and delete items from all email, contacts, and calendar folders and subfolders and reply to or forward messages.

OUTVIEW
http://www.outview.com/menu.asp
View combined calendars and schedule appointments for groups of Exchange Server users using a special Outlook form.

POSTTONOTE FOR MS EXCHANGE 2000
http://victori.hypermart.net/posttonote.html
Event sink to convert items mailed to public folders from IPM.Post to IPM.Note, effectively making Exchange 2000 behave like Exchange 5.5.

PUBNOTIFY FOR MS EXCHANGE 2000
http://victori.hypermart.net/pubnotify.html
Free Exchange store synchronous event sink to notify users when a new item is placed in an Exchange public folder. You'll need the Exchange Explorer utility from the Exchange SDK at http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/sample.asp?url=/MSDN-FILES/027/001/741/msdncompositedoc.xml to register the sink. (And you may need to remove the extra linefeed if the URL breaks across lines.)

QMAIL FOR OUTLOOK
http://www.olfolders.com/english/QMail/preface.htm
Replacement for the New Mail dialog in Outlook that displays the subject, sender, recipients, and plain text body of the message. If the message contains a script, you receive a warning. You can open or delete messages directly from the New Mail dialog.

SAFESPACE
http://www.boldonjames.com/products/safespace.htm
Document-sharing environment built on the Exchange 2000 storage system. Documents receive different security classifications and categories, and users can see only those documents that match their security clearance level and authorized categories. Supports business rules that require documents to be transmitted in digitally signed or encrypted formats.

WEB2POP
http://www.jmasoftware.com/english/index.html
Utility that allows you to receive mail from HotMail, AOL, or many other web-based mail providers via a POP account. Operates as a proxy POP server on your local machine that grabs information from the various services. It's receive-only and cannot send via those accounts.

Updated utilities

EXPRESS MAIL@MATE
http://www.express-soft.com/mailmate/
Version 2.4 of this email notification program adds new font selection and printing features and fixes Windows XP compatibility problems.

NETPAB
http://www.netpab.de/
Release N3076 of this tool for sharing PAB and PST files read-only supports Windows 9x, NT and 2000. Works with Outlook 97, 98, and 2000.

PROFILER
http://www.dir-wizards.com/
Version 2.5 of this web-based tool gives users the ability to set their own mail-forwarding address, automatically creating the necessary contact in Active Directory/Exchange 2000 or custom recipient in Exchange 5.5 as needed. Also includes a few bug fixes.

Other new resources

SECURING EXCHANGE 2000 SERVERS
http://www.windowsitpro.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid=23516
Tony Redmond discusses the new Edslock.vbs script to tighten permissions on the Exchange Domain Servers security group and when to use it, as well as some general background to the issue of administrators having access to all mailboxes.

XCCC EXCHANGE 2000 SERVER SP2 SERVER-SIDE OWA REGISTRY KEYS
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q311342
Registry modifications available for OWA in Exchange 2000 SP2.

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Updated Apr 07 2008

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