I have gotten this call before – A friend has a new computer. For a free dinner or maybe a few beers (Or Both!) would I help them move everything over?

Sure no problem I say. Just a few word docs, and an email account.

Hmm..an email account.

This friend of mine has used Gmail with Outlook – for a long time. As long as Gmail has been around. Unfortunately he only typed in his password once. Now, he can’t remember it.

So here we are. We have the password on his old machine. I can see those little *** taunting me in Outlook.

Sure, I could email the nice folks at Google and try to recover the password, but I know from experience this will take a long time.

Then I remembered there is an awesome utility from NirSoft called MailPassView. This little gem can pull the passwords out of almost every known email client.

You can download it from here:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mailpv.html

Within a few seconds of launching the app, it found my friend’s account:

A Double click on the entry and I had the password:

Much easier than trying password recovery with Google.

Here is a complete list of the email clients that it supports:

Outlook Express
Microsoft Outlook 2000 (POP3 and SMTP Accounts only)
Microsoft Outlook 2002/2003/2007/2010 (POP3, IMAP, HTTP and SMTP Accounts)
Windows Mail
Windows Live Mail
IncrediMail
Eudora
Netscape 6.x/7.x (If the password is not encrypted with master password)
Mozilla Thunderbird (If the password is not encrypted with master password)
Group Mail Free
Yahoo! Mail – If the password is saved in Yahoo! Messenger application.
Hotmail/MSN mail – If the password is saved in MSN/Windows/Live Messenger application.
Gmail – If the password is saved by Gmail Notifier application, Google Desktop, or by Google Talk.

Best of all, this thing is free. You can’t beat that!

Keep this one handy. You will need it someday.

One of the problems when deploying Microsoft Outlook is that there is always some form or wizard that needs to be completed before a user can start accessing their email.

Even in the latest version of Outlook, there are still setup pages the user has to fill out.

This can get especially annoying if you have users that logon to different computers across your network.

“Michael here. Um I am at the branch in Siberia. Need help with my Outlook again.”

Wouldn’t it be great if Michael could just launch Outlook and get right into his email?

Yes, you wouldn’t get to hear Michael’s great stories, but then you would have time to do other things.

We have an answer for this problem, and it is called Profile Generator.

Here is how it works. Simply visit the download page:

(Link: http://www.intelliadmin.com/index.php/outlookprofilegeneratordownload/)

Set your exchange server name, and pick your options.

Want Outlook to be configured with cache mode disabled?

- Check that box.

What about those laptops on the road?

- You can set it to configure HTTP based access.

Need to enable encryption?

- Check that box.

Then, once you have completed your selections, click the download button.

Our server will build a custom program that will apply all of the requested settings, and you can download it instantly.

Put the program in the users logon script, and now you have a lot more time on your hands.

Users are happy because their Outlook “Just works” everywhere on your network, and you are happy since you no longer have to deal with helping them set it up.

It works with Exchange 2003, 2007, and 2010 – and is compatible with Outlook XP, 2003, 2007, and 2010.

Only $299 for a company license. No per-user costs, just one price.

Check it out at:

http://www.intelliadmin.com/index.php/profile-generator/

We have gotten your emails, and fixed a few bugs with our Profile Generator beta. All of them were special side cases that prevented a generated profile from being used by outlook.

What is profile generator?

It is a command line application that you can drop into a logon script. Once it is there, users can launch Outlook and get right into their email. No more setup wizards, and no more support calls for those users that roam from location to location.

Here is how it works. You visit this web page:

http://www.intelliadmin.com/index.php/outlookprofilegeneratordownload

And pick your options – Make sure you at least fill out the exchange server host name…it won’t complain yet if you don’t (I did say it was beta right? )

If you are a current customer, don’t forget to put in your serial number at the bottom.

Click download, and you have a custom build of profile generator that is designed for your network.

Simply add it to a users logon script, and the next time they login they can launch Outlook without hassles.

If you purchase Profile Generator now, you will get an upgrade for free. All current customers will also get a free upgrade. If you purchased before November 2005, or do not have your serial number handy…send us an email at support@intelliadmin.com and we will take care of you right away.

Please send your bug reports to support@intelliadmin.com. If you see a feature you want added, let us know…we will try to get it in before the final release.

For quite some time we have had a product called Profile Generator.

It is a command line application that you can drop into a logon script. Once it is there, users can launch Outlook and get right into their email. No more setup wizards, and no more support calls for those users that roam from location to location.

One of the problems with it – all of the options are passed to it via the command line. In addition, it was missing a few features that people asked for over and over:

-Enabling, or disabling cached mode
-Delete all current profiles
-Setting a connection to an Exchange server via HTTP

We started cramming all of this into the command line. It was a mess. Too many options.

Our solution? We decided to take some technology from our Remote Control product. This new tech will allow users to generate custom versions of the Remote Control agent by making selections on a web page.

The remote control stuff isn’t ready yet, but with profile generator, we saw we could easily move it to the new system since it is only a command line application.

Here is how it works. You visit this web page:

http://www.intelliadmin.com/index.php/outlookprofilegeneratordownload

And pick your options – Make sure you at least fill out the exchange server host name…it won’t complain yet if you don’t (I did say it was beta right? )

If you are a current customer, don’t forget to put in your serial number at the bottom.

Click download, and you have a custom build of profile generator that is designed for your network.

Simply add it to a users logon script, and the next time they login they can launch Outlook without hassles.

This starts the public beta today. If you purchase Profile Generator now, you will get an upgrade for free. All current customers will also get a free upgrade. If you purchased before November 2005, or do not have your serial number handy…send us an email at support@intelliadmin.com and we will take care of you right away.

Please send your bug reports to support@intelliadmin.com. If you see a feature you want added, let us know…we will try to get it in before the final release.

Back in 2007, I wrote an article about an error that you get in Outlook when you have too many attachments of the same name:

Even Outlook 2010 has this problem.

In the article, I walk you through deleting these files by hand.

It is not an easy thing to do. You need to open the registry, find a key…then use that key to find a random folder name.

I thought it would be cool if we could build a utility that would do this for you. So, that is what we did:

It will automatically scan your registry, find all Microsoft Outlook attachments, and then display them to you in the main window.

If it all looks like stuff you want to remove, you just hit the “Clean Up” button and it will delete them for you.

Here comes the bonus. You can run it silently from the command line.

What would you need that for?

You might have user that opens lots of attachments, and runs into this bug all the time.

Here is how you can have it run without any prompts:

OutlookCleanup.exe /SILENT


It will quietly scan through your registry and find the temp folder and empty it. Throw this in a batch file and have it run at logon – you will never have to deal with this problem again.

Another thought came to mind while working on this: This is a security problem too.

While email is on your Exchange server…it is relatively secure. Not knowing this you might open a sensitive document, read it, and when you are finished – delete it. Unknown to you, Outlook has just made a copy of it and it is sitting right there on your hard drive. Waiting for someone to grab.

Until MS provides a fix, you can use this little utility to keep your Outlook attachments clean. I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for an update – this bug has been around since 2002.

Get your copy from our free downloads page

One of the problems when deploying MS Outlook is that there is always some a wizard that needs to be completed before a user can start accessing their email.

Even in the latest version of Outlook, there are setup pages the user has to fill out.

This can get annoying if you have users that logon to different computers across your network.

“Michael here. Um I am at the branch in Siberia. Need help with my Outlook again.”

Wouldn’t it be great if Michael could just launch Outlook and get right into his email?

Yes, you wouldn’t get to hear Michael’s great stories, but then you would have time to do other things.

We have an answer for this problem, and it is called Profile Generator.

Here is how it works. Simply visit the download page:

(Link: http://www.intelliadmin.com/index.php/outlookprofilegeneratordownload/)

Set your exchange server name, and pick your options.

Want Outlook to be configured with cache mode disabled?

- Check that box.

What about those laptops on the road?

- You can set it to configure HTTP based access.

Need to enable encryption?

- Check that box.

Then, once you have completed your selections, click the download button.

Our server will build a custom program that will apply all of the requested settings, and you can download it instantly.

Put the program in the users logon script, and now you have a lot more time on your hands.

Users are happy because their Outlook “Just works” everywhere on your network, and you are happy since you no longer have to deal with helping them set it up.

It works with Exchange 2003, 2007, and 2010 – and is compatible with Outlook XP, 2003, 2007, and 2010.

Only $299 for a company license. No per-user costs, just one price.

Check it out at:

http://www.intelliadmin.com/index.php/profile-generator/

With Microsoft Outlook there is always some form or wizard that needs to be completed before a user can start accessing their email.

Even in Outlook 2010, there are still setup pages the user has to fill out.

This can get especially painful if you have users that logon to different computers across your network.

We have an answer for this problem, and it is called Profile Generator.

Here is how it works…

Visit the download page:

(Link: http://www.intelliadmin.com/index.php/outlookprofilegeneratordownload/)

Set your exchange host name, and select your options.

Want Outlook to be configured with cache mode disabled?

- Check that box.

What about those laptops on the road?

- You can set it to configure HTTP based access.

Need to enable encryption?

- Check that box.

Then, once you have completed your selections, click the download button.

Our server will build a custom program that will apply all of the requested settings, and you can download it instantly.

Put the program in the users logon script, and now you have a lot more time on your hands.

Users are happy because their Outlook “Just works” everywhere on your network, and you are happy since you no longer have to deal with helping them set it up.

It works with Exchange 2003, 2007, and 2010 – and is compatible with Outlook XP, 2003, 2007, and 2010.

Only $299 for a company license. No per-user costs, just one price.

Check it out at:

http://www.intelliadmin.com/index.php/profile-generator/

I recently received a question from a reader:

Hi Steve,

It is very informative; however, it was almost what I was looking for. I would like to change the default OPEN location, so I was wondering if you know how that would be accomplished.

Very good question. It could be useful to have Outlook open to the folder of your choice when clicking on the attachment button – especially if you send lots of them every day.

The default option is that it opens to the documents folder:

The bummer is that after lots of research, I have come to the conclusion that the only way to change this is to change the location of your “My Documents” folder

You can change the folder location by right clicking it on your desktop, and going to properties. Or you can dig into the registry down to this key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders

Find the “Personal” value, and change it to your folder of choice. From that point on Outlook will default to that folder when you go to attach a file. The side effect of this is that it changes the location of your “My Documents” folder – so this is a trade off you will need to consider.

That is the only way I know to change it. If anyone else has a better method, please email me (support@intelliadmin.com) or drop a line in the comments.

Back in 2007 I wrote an article on how to backup your auto-complete data in Outlook. This tip is for Outlook 2003 – even though I don’t mention it – it works for Outlook 2007 too.

What is Auto-Complete? When you start typing out an email address, outlook will automatically start filling it out for you.

I showed you how to delete these items, but what if you wanted to add items to the auto complete list? Well…I have found just the tool to do that. It is called NK2View from NirSoft.

If you download a copy of it, and run it will automatically find the N2K file for the current profile. See my old article on how to find this file yourself – you might want to do this before using this tool so you can back it up. After running the program, you will see items in the auto-complete database (N2K file).

You can delete items, edit them, export to HTML, and the best part…you can import contacts from your Outlook contact list:

This can be a life saver. If a machine blows up, and you want to restore a decent auto-complete list for the user, you can use it to import their contact list from Exchange.

All in all it is a great tool. Best of all it is free. Make sure you backup your N2K file before saving, since you never know what crazy things Microsoft will do with future patches to break a great tool like this.

I have been seeing this message on and off with attachments for some time now in outlook:

Can’t Create file: VoiceMessage.wav. Right-Click the folder you want to create the file in, and then click properties on the shortcut menu to check your permissions for the folder

In this case it was a voicemail. Sometimes it is a PDF file, other times it is a BMP. The only connection I started to notice was the name of the file.

After some research I discovered that Outlook saves every single attachment you download – in a temp folder. If the same file name exists, it simply appends a number like this:

The only problem is that it gets stuck at 100. Once you have had 100 attachments with the same name you get the error message I described.

The trick is finding *where* outlook is storing all of this.

Update August, 2010 – We just created a utility that will clean up this folder for you. Look for the Outlook Cleanup Tool in our downloads section.

For more information about the download, visit this page

Microsoft decided that they would create a random folder name to keep viruses and maleware from finding this folder and exploiting it to their advantage.

The folder path can be found under this key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security

See the variable on the right named “OutlookSecureTempFolder” – That is your path

Now that you know where the files are you can simply clear them out from time to time, and the error will go away.

Still, I am a little irritated that this problem has not been fixed by know in a service pack, or a patch. Hopefully Outlook 2007 does not have the same issue.