A recent college grad asks "For the last 3 years, I’ve been using outlook 2003 on my computer to access my gmail account, and my school email account through their VPN. I have 3 years worth of personal contacts and recurring calendar items, etc., but when I split the school account from my outlook, all of my contacts and calendar items went with it. Now I can only access them online through the school’s Outlook Exchange option. My access to will expire shortly as I’ve recently graduated. How do I get them all into my desktop outlook program?"

You'll need to restore the school's account to Outlook, either by creating a new profile or using System Restore to revert to a time period before you removed the profile. As long as you used cache mode with the account, you only need to be able to open the profile, not connect the Exchange server.

After you open Outlook with the Exchange profile, either export the contents of the mailbox to a PST or add a PST to the profile and move the contents of your mailbox to it. When you are finished, remove the Exchange account from your profile.

If you no longer have access to the Exchange server or too much time has passed for system restore, you may be out of luck. If you used cached or offline mode, there are a few tools that can recover data from an orphaned OST, see http://www.slipstick.com/problems/repair2gbpst.asp#tools for the list.

For those who will be facing a similar situation in the future, export or move the contents of the mailbox to a PST before you remove the Exchange profile from your Outlook.

Not too long ago I was accused of always saying "No, it can't be done" every time someone asked how to do something in Outlook. Ignoring the fact that No was the appropriate answer to the questions, I started looking for questions where "Sure you can do it" would be an appropriate response.

I want to create a distribution list from the Inbox emails. Many of these emails will not ever be in my Contacts. How do I add people's emails to a selected Distribution lists directly from the Inbox and NOT have them in my Contacts?

Well, you could copy the address from each message and paste them into the DL.

Unfortunately this copy and paste method is not practical for more than a handful of addresses. Other users might take the easy way out add them to Contacts, either by right clicking or using one of several utilities that captures addresses and creates contacts. But you don't want or need them in contacts.

Fortunately, there are two more options: a Outlook add-in or copy and paste using one of my favorite Outlook capabilities that is often overlooked: the ability to copy and paste view data to other applications. While an add-in is cost effective if you do this often, the manual method is fast and easy for a one-time deal.

First, unless you need the addresses from all of the messages in your Inbox, you'll want to separate the messages you need the addresses from, from the ones you don't need. If there are keywords or categories that you can search on, leave them in the Inbox and create a Search folder or custom view, otherwise you'll need to move them to a new folder.

Next, create a custom view that displays only the email address of the sender. Since Outlook doesn't include a sender's email address field, you'll need to install a Form Setup file (*.CFG) that exposes the sender's address. Download it from http://www.slipstick.com/exs/customfields.htm and install it.

Once the form is installed, create a view that contains only the email address field, either by making a new custom view or editing the current view. If you edit the current view, reset it after you collect the addresses..

Finally, copy the addresses and paste into the Select Members, Members field of the DL form and save the DL. If you need help with this task, see the following articles.
http://www.outlook-tips.net/howto/copy_data.htm 
http://www.outlook-tips.net/archives/2004/20041105.htm 

If you do this frequently, there are add-ins that make the process even easier, including Sperry Software's Distribution List Manager. See Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Distribution Lists and Data Entry and Updating Tools for Outlook for distribution list and contact tools.

If you have a Hotmail/MSN/Live account and the Outlook connector stops collecting new mail you’ll need to download the beta version of the connector.

I have an Outlook Live account and I’m not sure which irritates me more: that the released version of the connector just stopped working for paid subscribers or that the beta wasn’t pushed down as an update since it’s the only way to get the mail into Outlook.

Outlook Connector Beta download
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9A2279B1-DF0A-46E1-AA93-7D4870871ECF 

If you have a free Hotmail/MSN/Live account the new connector allows calendar syncing and sharing for everyone, not just users with paid accounts.