Creating a sent item in Outlook without sending it

I was asked if it was possible to create an email within Outlook and make it look like it had been sent, without actually ever sending it. This question is very much in the grey area of "Don't ask why?"

After rummaging around on the Internet I couldn't actually find a reliable answer, but I remembered doing something similar with the nickname (.nk2 file) 

1. Open Outlook
2. Click File - Manage Rules & Alters
3. Click Next
4. At the bottom of the window under Start from a blank rule, select 'Apply rule on messages I send'
5. Click Next
6. Tick the box that says 'sent to people or public group' then in the bottom window click on the underlined text 'people or public group'
7. In the To box enter the email address you are sending to then click OK
8. Click Next
9. Tick the box that says 'move a copy to the specified folder' then in the bottom window click on the underlined text 'specified'
10. Select Sent Items and click OK
11. Click Next (twice)
12. Click Finish
13. You will be warned that this rule will only run when Outlook is running, click OK (twice)
14. Either Disable your wireless / Internet connection OR put make Outlook Work Offline.
15. Create a new email and send it.
16. As Outlook is offline the message should stay in your Outbox. Scroll through your folders until you find the Outbox, it should show that 1 message is unread. Click into the Outbox and then delete the email contained within.
17. Navigate to your Sent Items, this should also show 1 unread item which is the email you have just 'sent'
18. If you want to modify the date on a sent item then you can do so by modifying the date / time on your computer. 


I am currently still searching for a simpler solution, and am also looking out for some sort of add-in that may just create the sent object automatically without having to go thorough the steps outlined above

Word / Office 2013 has stopped working

Annoyingly if you look around the web for Word / Office crashing on start up or "has stopped working" you will find thousands of posts all recommending the same thing; start word in safe mode and then disable COM Addins. 

After trouble shooting the issue for 3 hours and trying a variety of things I finally managed to resolve my problem. It seems my users issue was to do with their USB docking station (and the version of the Display link Adapter software they had installed)

I guess I could try upgrading the version of the software, but the user works in a different country so I don't want start uninstalling anything that may cause me to be disconnected. To get them up and running I was able to disable hardware acceleration for office, to do this

Run Regedit
Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common
Create a new Key called Graphics
Under the new key create a new DWORD called DisableHardwareAcceleration
Set the DWORD value to 1

Outlook 2013 New Feature

I’ve started upgrading a few people from Outlook 2007/2010 to 2013 and have come across a new feature that’s really going to help out some of my users.

Some of my users have mammoth mailboxes, one in particular is at 20GB. Outlook in cached mode routinely slows up and the only explanation that we can reach is that Outlook must be doing some routine maintenance on the OST. It became so unusable that we turned off cached mode for that user. The answer is to obviously delete and archive email but some users are stubborn.

We did switch off Outlook caching, but now we find that when the user is going in and out of folders etc that Outlook will hang for a few seconds, its quite frustrating.

Anyway onto Outlook 2013, under account settings there is a now a slider titled “Mail to keep offline” it ranges from 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months and all. 

Outlook 2010 - Finding a misfiled email

Every so often I get a phone about finding lost or misfiled emails. Normally the user has accidentally dragged the email to a folder and misfiled it.

Luckily the search facility in Outlook 2010 is pretty good.

Click on your Inbox and then into the "Search Inbox" field. The toolbar at the top of the screen should now display some search options, the default is to search "Current Folder", change this to "All Subfolders"

99% of the time this will find the email I am looking for. Sometimes the user will want to know what folder the email was misfiled in, simply double click on the email and then click on the File tab. Under the "Move to Folder" option it should display "Current Folder: "

Follow Up: Exchange / Outlook Nickname (NK2) contacts syncing to iPhone

OK, so in my last blog posted I talked about an annoying problem with setting up contacts with the iPhone and Exchange 2010 and while the work around I posted hid a lot of unnecessary contacts they are still actually on the device. This causes a problem for a lot of my mobile users as a number of them sync their contacts via blue tooth with their in car systems.

The first time I had one of them do this they reported that they had 1000+ contacts listed on their in car system.

A previous work around I had used for the BlackBerry was to move all the contacts to a secondary address book and then have them store only telephone numbers in their main 'Contacts' address book within Outlook. On the iPhone this doesn't work.

So here's how I solved this problem (or at least this is my work around)

Within Outlook export all the contacts from the address book to a CSV file.

Go to GMail and import the CSV

From GMail export the contacts to a vCard format.

Go to iCloud and import the vCard

Now setup your iPhone to only sync contacts from iCloud and not Exchange.

Seems a little messy really, Apple should really come up with a fix for this, as when my users add new contacts they will need to do it via the device/iCloud and then also in Outlook.

Exchange / Outlook Nickname (NK2) contacts syncing to iPhone

So I'm fairly new to iPhone (having had a BlackBerry for 4 years). Since setting my iPhone 5 to sync contacts, email etc with Exchange 2010 I've had a rather annoying issue, it seems that the iPhone picks up the "Suggested Contacts" folder, this means that my iPhone now has a contact for every single person that I've ever send an email to.

I read a couple of articles which suggest the way to fix the issue is to disable the suggest contacts, for me this would work fine, however the majority of my users use the suggested contacts. The solution is actually rather simple.

On the iPhone go to Contacts
Go to Groups
Check all the address books that you don't want to sync.

You should only open attachments from a trustworthy source

I have dealt with an issue today that took me a little while to figure out.

A user using Outlook 2007 was getting prompted every time they opened an attachment to either save or open it.

"You should only open attachments from a trustworthy source"

On my computer this seemed like a simple fix, unchecked the box that says "Always ask before opening this type of file" However on my end users PC this option was grayed out. Turns out that Outlook needs to be running in Administrator mode. This lead me to my next problem, all their Outlook shortcuts lacked the "Right Click - Run As Administrator" option. So I created a new shortcut for the user on their desktop pointing it to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Outlook.exe they now have the option to Run Outlook as an administrator.

None of your e-mail accounts could send to this recipient

Ok I had a very strange email issue today. One of my clients tried sending to various email addresses and kept getting a bounce message with “None of your e-mail accounts could send to this recipient” error. 

After some investigation a number of contacts had been setup to use “MAILTO” rather than “SMTP” (you can check this by double clicking on the contacts name) to resolve the issue I deleted the contact and typed them in, then doubled clicked on them to verify that it had defaulted to SMTP.