The following articles were included in our Exchange Messaging Outlook (EMO) newsletter published on November 18, 2021.
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Today's Highlights
- Remove Accounts from Outlook profile
- Create a Contact Group using a filtered view
- Search mail by date uses wrong dates
Remove Accounts from Outlook profile
At least once a week someone asks me how to remove an account from their profile. They changed ISPs or left a previous employer and every time they open Outlook, they are asked for the password to the invalid account. In a few cases, the users removed the account, but they are confused because the old email address is still listed in the navigation pane.
“I have an account in my Outlook that's been cancelled by my previous employer. When I open Outlook, it asks for the password and since I don’t have a current password, Outlook is completely blocked. I have two other accounts in Outlook and can’t access them. “
In many cases, you can cancel the sign in dialog and Outlook will open.
If Outlook will open when you click Cancel, go to File > Account Settings > Account Settings. Select the account an the Email tab and remove it. If it’s an IMAP or Exchange account, the cached data will be deleted from your computer. If you need to keep any content in the mailbox, you’ll need to export it BEFORE you remove the account from your profile. Export the data using File > Open & Export > Import & Export and export to a pst file.
If it’s a POP3 account, you can delete the email account without exporting the mailbox. The data file will remain in your folder list, with the email address as the data file name. You can remove the data file from the Data files tab if you no longer need to access the email in the pst file. This will not delete the pst from your computer, so you can reopen it later if needed.
If Outlook will not open unless you enter a password, open Control panel, find “Mail (Microsoft Outlook)”. Open your profile and remove the account or create a new profile.
Create a Contact Group using a filtered view
An Outlook user wanted to know how to create a contact group for contacts in a specific domain. The method that will work for this user will work with any search results or filtered view in Outlook. However, it is specific to Outlook on Windows and will not work in Outlook on the web or Outlook on Mac.
“I am trying to create a contact group for all of my contacts in a specific domain. I don’t want to look through thousands of contacts and select them individually to add to a group. Is there an easy way to do this? “
Sure. You need to search your contacts for the domain name. If you just type domainname.com in the search field, Outlook will search for the domain or TLD in notes and other fields. Using @domain.com can help filter out contacts where the domain is in notes or in other parts of the contact.
Or, you can search for the domain in the email address field, using “e-maillist:@domain.tld”
When the search is complete, remove all of the fields from the view, except for display name and/or the email address fields. Select all and copy. In the Contact group form, choose Add Members > From Outlook contact and paste the names in the Member field. Click Ok the save your contact Group and reset the view on your Contacts folder.
Note that Outlook will complain it can’t find a match for the first entry, which is the field names from your contacts folder. Delete the line before clicking OK, but if you forget, delete it after Outlook says it can’t resolve the contact. Cancel the resolution dialog and delete the fields names then click OK.
Search mail by date uses wrong dates
When you search for mail received within a specific date period (such as “received:11/15/2021”) , Outlook may include mail received the day before (or the day after, if you are in a + time zone). This is because the search currently uses UTC time, not local time, when searching dates.
Until Microsoft fixes this, you can use Advanced Find (Ctrl+Shift+F) if you want to view specific dates, or include two days in the search (received:11/16/2021..11/17/2021) and deal with the extra results.
A custom view with a date filter will also work (or a search folder), but creating a custom view or search folder to view a specific date is a few extra steps. If you always search for mail received in a specific period, such as “yesterday” or “last 7 days”, a custom view or search folder will work.
Based on my tests, only Microsoft-hosted accounts are affected, this includes both Outlook.com and Office 365 mailboxes. IMAP and POP accounts are not affected by this bug.
New & Updated Exchange Server KB Articles
Outlook and mobile clients don’t authenticate after November 2021 fixes for Windows installed
Incomplete search results after installing an Exchange Server 2019 update
Fixes an issue in which you get incomplete search results after installing Exchange Server 2019 update
Cumulative Update 11 for Exchange Server 2019 (KB5005334)
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