Distribution List Size Limits - Microsoft Exchange with Outlook

There is a limit (29 KB) to how large a distribution list stored on the server can be.

Distribution lists are saved lists of email addresses for use when sending a message to a

number of recipients. Generally, personal distribution lists will be stored in your personal Contacts list on the Microsoft Exchange server.

The limit for distribution lists stored on the server, is based on the size of the individual

contacts, not the number of contacts. Each distribution list can not exceed 29KB. This

limit applies whether the members of the distribution list are selected from your Contacts

folder, entered as full email addresses, or selected directly from the Global Address list

(GAL). Any single distribution list cannot exceed 29KB.

If you use very basic information for each contact (for example, only the name and the email address), your distribution list limit may be as high as 125 to 130 contacts.

If you have additional information on each contact (address, phone/fax numbers, birthdates, etc.), your distribution list limit may be significantly lowered.  

 

Outlook Keeps Asking for a Password

Many Outlook users over the years have complained that Outlook keeps asking for a (network) password repeatedly. The problem is exacerbated when “Enter Network Password” pop-up message appears every 20-30 seconds - how frustrating! Even after you enter your correct user name and password the pop up keeps flashing and unfortunately, enabling the "Save Password" or "Remember Password" options do not solve the problem.

 

Two possible reasons for this problem:

• You have a corrupted Outlook profile (this is the most common)
• Your registry has incorrect Protected Storage System information (Please do *NOT* attempt this if you are inexperienced or unsure of working in the registry)

Fix your corrupted Outlook profile:

Create a new outlook profile and connect this profile to the .pst file (Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders data file that contains your contacts, emails, calendar, tasks, etc.) of your previous (corrupted) profile:

1. Create new outlook profile: http://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/newprofile.htm#create 
2. Locate the .pst file used by damaged profile: http://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/aboutpst.htm#location 
3. Configure new profile to use .pst file of old, corrupted profile. This can be done by following the given below steps (these steps are for Microsoft Outlook 2010):

1. Open Outlook.
2. File tab -> Info -> click Account Settings (Outlook 2007 Account Settings option is available in Tool menu, in Outlook 2003 and 2002 Tool -> Options).
3. E-mail tab-> click your email account. (in Outlook 2003 and 2002 Mail Setup -> Email Accounts -> View or change existing e-mail accounts - > Next)
4. In the "Account Settings" dialogue box Click "Change Folder".
5. Click New Outlook Data File-> click Office Outlook Personal Folders File-> click OK.
6. Browse and locate the .pst file of old profile-> click OK.

Resolve Your  Incorrect Registry information Problem:

Close all  programs, create a backup copy of the registry

1. Click on Start > Start Search
2. Type in Regedit and hit Enter
3. Locate the folder : HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders
4. Edit Menu > New > Expandable String Value
5. Name it AppData
6. Double-click the new entry and type in: "%userprofile%\Application Data" (without the quotes) in the "Value data field" box.
7. Click "OK" and close the registry editor.

Note: Before following this solution make sure that you have created a backup copy of registry.

Which Outlook is which?

There is obvious confusion these days between Microsoft Outlook, Outlook.com (the new Hotmail), and Outlook 365. What are they?

Microsoft Outlook is part of Microsoft Office that you install on your PC or laptop. You set it up as a client to receive your email be it Exchange, POP3, IMAP, or you use the Hotmail Connector to get your Hotmail into Outlook. It is a suite of applications that work together that are installed locally on your PC. You can read more here: Microsoft Office Information

Outlook.com is the new Hotmail. Hotmail started out years ago as HoTMaiL - web-based HTML email. It evolved into Hotmail, became Windows Live, and has now been renamed to Outlook.com. This is confusing, but Outlook.com is simply just the new Hotmail. You can access it online or still use the Hotmail Connector to pull it into Microsoft Outlook.

If you currently have a Hotmail email address, you can go through the steps to convert it to an Outlook.com email address. It's very easy to do and the steps are presented to you one at a time. You can read more here: Outlook.com Information

Outlook 365 is essentially Outlook in the cloud. It is secure, anywhere access to Outlook, calendars, mail, etc. It's part of Office 365 and even includes file sharing. Here is a breakdown of Office 365:

 Cloud-based professional email

 Video conferencing and IM

 Share files inside and outside your organization

 Easy and secure administration

 Financially backed reliability

 Predictable monthly costs with no up-front infrastructure costs 

To find out more about Office 365, you can go here: Office 365 Information

As always, feel free to post and ask questions.

Outlook Message Recall

Today I'm going to cover how Message Recall works in Outlook. This is only of interest to you if you have an Exchange server mailbox since this feature requires Microsoft Exchange mail server running in the background in order to work. Most home and personal accounts do not use Exchange.

Message recall is an excellent tool if you've sent an email in error. Perhaps you've made a terrible spelling error or forgot to attach an important document. Email is a great way to share communications, schedule meetings and events, and even share documents.

Side note: I do not recommend emailing documents to your co-workers. If you're on the same network, rather than clutter up their mailbox and yours with needless attachments, you should instead place the document in a folder in a network location that everyone can access and simply email a hyperlink to it.

Back to recalling a message! Sometimes your day is so busy and rushed, you may fail to include pertinent information, a critical document, or misspell words which comes across as very unprofessional. What if you sent the email to the wrong person? It's only after you hit the SEND button that you realize your mistake!

How do you fix this? You want to recall the original message and send another with the correct information included and/or to the correct intended recipient. For anyone who hasn't opened the email yet, you can perform a little bit of trickery and pull the email out of their Inbox quietly and replace it.

What steps does it take to do this? Read the following:

1. In Mail, in the Navigation Pane, click Sent Items.
2. Open (double-click, don't simply highlight) the message you want to recall or replace.
3. On the Actions menu, click Recall This Message.
4. Click Delete unread copies and replace with a new message.

Note If you are sending the message to a large number of people, you may want to consider clearing the Tell me if recall succeeds or fails for each recipient check box.

5. Click OK, and then type a new message and include the attachment.
6. Click Send. 

What if you don't see Recall This Message on the Actions menu? Make sure you are in the Sent Items folder. The command will also not appear if you are using a POP3, IMAP, or HTTP e-mail account, including MSN Hotmail. Remember, Recall This Message only works if you have an Exchange mailbox.

In some scenarios, you simply wish to Recall This Message and choose Delete Unread Copies of This Message. Say you sent out an invitation to a party for your co-workers, but you chose the wrong date. Simply recall and delete the message quickly.

Here's your next big question: Will my recall be successful?

Whether or not your recall works will depend on several factors. The settings your recipient has configured in Outlook, whether or not you requested a response to notify you whether or not the recall failed, and the time it takes for your message and even your recall to reach the recipient.

Here are some different situations you may run across:

You send an email. You perform the steps to recall and replace it. In your recipient's copy of Outlook, they have selected Process Requests and Responses Upon Arrival in Tracking Options.
What happens next is that both the original email and the recall request arrive in their Inbox. Assuming that the original email has not been read, your original email is deleted and your recipient is notified that you deleted the message from their Inbox.
NOTE: If your original message is marked as read, then when the recall message is processed the recipient is informed that you wish to recall the message. However the message remains in your recipient's Outlook Inbox. Viewing the email in the Reading Pane does not constitute being read.

You send an email. You perform the steps to recall and replace it. Your recpient does NOT have Process Requests and Responses Upon Arrival selected in Tracking Options. Your recipient receives both the original email and the recall. One of two scenarios happens for your recipient:

• If your recipient opens and reads your recall message first then the original email is deleted. The recipient is informed that you deleted the email from their mailbox.
• If your recipient opens and reads your email first, the recall fails. Both the email and the recall remain in their mailbox and are available to them. Again, viewing the email in the Reading Pane does not constitute being read.

You send an email. You perform the steps to recall and replace it. Your recipient has moved your email to another folder, either by a rule or manually by dragging and dropping. The recall message remains in the Inbox, or is moved to another folder. If the recall message and the original email exist in separate folders, the recall attempt fails. This happens no matter what settings are configured in Outlook. This leaves both the original message and the recall available to the recipient.

You send an email. You perform the steps to recall and replace it. Your recipient has either manually moved both emails to the same folder, or used a rule to move both messages to the same folder (not in the Inbox). This will cause Outlook to behave as though it's NOT set to Process Requests and Responses upon Arrival. One of two scenarios happens for your recipient:

• If your recipient opens and reads your recall message first then the original email is deleted. The recipient is informed that you deleted the email from their mailbox.
• If your recipient opens and reads your email first, the recall fails. Both the email and the recall remain in their mailbox and are available to them. Again, viewing the email in the Reading Pane does not constitute being read.

If your recipient reads the mail and then marks it as unread, Outlook will treat the email as though it has never been read.

You send an email to a Public Folder on Exchange. You perform the steps to recall and replace it. One of the following scenarios will occur:

• If the recipient reading the recall message created and has read access to all the items in the public folder, and didn't read the original message, the recall succeeds, and only the new message remains. You, the sender, receive a message indicating that the recall succeeded.
• If the recipient has already marked the original message as read, he or she is informed that the recall failed, and only the recall message is deleted.

If a user with different or any other Public Folder rights opens the recall message, the recall will fail. Both the old and new messages will stay in the Public Folder. In a Public Folder, it is the Reader's Rights, not the Sender's, that determine if a recall attempt succeeds or fails.   

The Outlook Toolbar

A menu displays a list of commands. Some of these commands have images next to them so you can quickly associate the command with the image. Most menus are located on the menu bar which is across the toolbar at the top of the screen.

Toolbars can contain buttons, menus, or a combination of both.

Microsoft Outlook automatically customizes menus and toolbars based on how often you use the commands. When you first start Outlook,. only the most basic commands appear. Then as you work, the menus and toolbars adjust so that only the commands and toolbar buttons you use most often appear.

To look for a command that you don't use often or have never used before, click the double down-facing arrows at the bottom of the menu to show all the commands. You can also double-click the menu to expand it. When you expand one menu, all of the menus are expanded until you choose a command or perform another action. When you click a command on the expanded menu, the command is immediately added to the short version of the menu. If you do not use the command often, it is eventually dropped from the short version of the menu.

 

 

Microsoft Outlook Views

The two main views I'm going to cover today are the Outlook Bar and the Folder List.

• Outlook Bar: The column on the left side of the Outlook window that includes groups such as Outlook Shortcuts or My Shortcuts, and the shortcuts within each group. Click a group to show the shortcuts contained within it. Click a shortcut to quickly access that particular component of Outlook.

• By default, Outlook displays folders under the Outlook Bar for each of the following item types: Inbox, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, and Notes. It also provides the following folders: Drafts (stores unfinished emails you are working on), Sent Items (copies of emails you sent to other people), Deleted Items (stores temporarily deleted items until you permanently delete them. The Deleted Items folder is NOT a storage folder.

• In Microsoft Outlook, you store information in folders, the same way you store documents in Windows Explorer or even a file cabinet. You use a variety of folders based on the type of Outlook item you're working with and the type of email account you have. The Folder List is the most complete list of all the components and information held within Outlook.

• The Folder List is not displayed by default. To make the Folder List appear, perform the following steps: In Outlook, click on the View Menu at the top of the screen. Click on Folder List in the menu. If "Folder List" does not immediately appear as an option, single click the double down arros at the bottom of the menu list to see the full menu.

Email Attachment Handling for the Visually Impaired

I want to credit Karen McCall for the following information. She's a Microsoft Word MVP in Canada and her contributions to Microsoft accessibility are invaluable. I will include her information at the end of this blog.

A note if you're using adaptive technology:

First go into Word and turn off Screen Reading Layout or Reading Layout as this is an inaccessible view of documents when using adaptive technology.

In both Outlook 2007 & 2010 if you press Alt + F for the File Menu, Office Button or File/Backstage area (it has changed over the past iterations of Office but can be accessed using the same keyboard command) you’ll see “Save Attachments.”

If you are saving Office documents through Outlook 2010, once you open them they are in Preview mode so you need to press Alt + F, letter I for File/Backstage area, Info and then turn on editing by then pressing E.

Here are the steps for Outlook 2010 from when an email arrives:

1. Press Enter to open an e-mail with an attachment.
2. Your cursor will be on the first line of the message.
3. Press Shift + Tab to move to the attachments area of the e-mail.
4. You can then use the Arrow keys to move among attachments.
5. Press Enter on an attachment you want to open.
6. If it is an Office document, you’ll then have to press Alt + F, letter I, E once the document opens as it will be in Protected view.
7. Press Escape on the e-mail post to close the post and return to Outlook.

You can choose to press the AppKey (located to the immediate left of the Ctrl key on the right side of the main keyboard area…has two little square applications on it) or Shift + F10 would also work I think. This gives you the option to open or save as without going through the Office Button/File menu in Outlook 2007 or the File/Backstage area of 2010.

You can use Shift + Tab when a post is open to move to the BCC, CC or To field, press the AppKey/right mouse button and perform actions on addresses in those fields. Tab would move you forward through these fields.

You can choose to go to the File Menu, Office button or File/Backstage area (depending on your version of Outlook) and choose Save Attachments. This will let you save all attachments to a location on your computer or storage device. As with the other method of saving attachments, if it is an Office document you’ll have to turn off Preview mode.

I haven’t found a way to open or work with attachments in the Reading Pane (this happens in emails received in Rich Text Format). At one time F6 and Shift + F6 would move you forward or backward through the larger pieces of Outlook like the list of messages to the Reading Pane to the To Do Bar to the Status Bar and so forth and using Tab or Shift + Tab would move you forward or backward through the pieces of each larger chunk….the Reading Pane for example. This would let you navigate to the reading Pane using F6 and then use Shift + Tab to move to the Attachments area and work with attachments but this does not work consistently so working with attachments in the Reading Pane is not possible, you have to open the message or use the Save Attachments tool.

If someone is blind and using the JAWS  screen reader, JAWS 13 announces it when you come across an attachment in Outlook 2010.

 A person using JAWS will hear that there is an attachment as long as the Attachments Colum in the mail folder is visible. This is the little paper clip next to a message. Pressing the JAWS command for listing objects, Ctrl + Shift + letter O will give you a list of the attachments which in this case are objects.

I used the ability to create random text in Word/Outlook to create the surrounding text as many people just plunk objects into e-mail. The keyboard  command is =rand(3). This will put three paragraphs of text from the \Office Help files into a document. Each paragraph will have a default number of 3 sentences. If you type (4, 5) and press Enter you’ll get 4 paragraphs each with 5 sentences. I include this in case you didn’t know…

Anyway, I can either use the Up and Down Arrow keys on their own or with the screen reader and the objects can also be found.

Even if the attachment is indented on a line….is not at the left margin which is where most adaptive technology recognizes objects, JAWS 13 in Outlook 2010 found it and told me it was there. So once I knew it was there, or if you actually can see the attachment, select it by placing your cursor just before it and press the Shift key + right Arrow.

You can then press the AppKey/right mouse button to access the context menu.

There are lots of clues that the post contains an attachment and using the keyboard you can choose which ones to open or save, even print. If you need all attachments, it is still better to go through the Alt + F, Save Attachments method.

In case you might need these, I have a page for Office 2007 accessibility including an Excel workbook with all the Ribbon, Sub-Ribbon and Non-Ribbon commands for Office 2007.

http://karlencommunications.com/MicrosoftOfficeAccessibility.html

And a page for Office 2010 with some resources:

http://karlencommunications.com/MicrosoftOfficeAccessibility2010.html

There is a book on each page about how to use OneNote from the Keyboard.

Karen McCall, M.Ed.

Microsoft MVP/Most Valued Professional for Word (2009-2011)
Canadian delegate to the ISO/TC 171 committee
Member of PDF/UA Universal Access working group
Member of G3ICT
Karlen Communications
Paris ON Canada

Organizing Your Inbox - Colour Code With Automatic Formatting

Whether you have lots of email or just a few messages, you can use colour to help you quickly determine what you have. You can use the Automatic Formatting feature to quickly organize your email with colour. For example, you can see messages from your boss in one colour, and messages from your spouse in another!

Use Automatic Formatting to make specific messages stand out in the colour of your choice so that even if you have thousands of emails, messages from your boss stand out and catch your eye.

Select an email message. Click on the Organize command on the Tools menu. You'll find the Organize option when you click on Tools > Organize. Next click "Using Colours." Set the rule for colour coding, then apply it.

Outlook creates an Automatic Formatting rule and shows you the details in the Automatic Formatting dialogue box. If you want to see the rule, click the Automatic Formatting button in the Organize pane.

You can use this feature to colour code:

• Mail from any specific person of your choosing
• Mail to any email distribution list that you belong to
• Mail regarding any specific subject that you choose

Don't forget to test this out. Try turning colour coding off and on, or even change the colour. Delete and recreate the rule.

In review, you may use colour coding to help you organize your inbox by making certain emails stand out visually.