Personal folders a separate ‘account’? (Outlook 2002 SP-2)

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Probably a dumb question, but I’ve done a fair amount of searching without finding an answer.

I have (or would say I have) a single e-mail “account” — namely, my POP3 e-mail account with Earthlink. But the E-mail accounts dialog in Outlook shows 2 separate accounts, one being the Earthlink account and the other being “Personal Folders” (which is shown as an IMAP account). Both “accounts” show on the Tools–>Send and Receive sub-menu, and both “accounts” show if I go to the dialog for creating/modifying Send/Receive Groups.

Is this normal, or is this a misconfiguration? If it’s the latter: (1) When I set up my Earthlink account, should I have modified/renamed the “Personal Folders” account rather than adding a new account? and (2) At this point, should I simply delete the Personal Folders “account” (I obviously don’t want to delete the Personal Folders themselves), or should I delete the Earthlink account and modify the Personal Folders account to turn it into the POP3 Earthlink account?

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I think it’s a sign of some corruption in the Registry. One of my colleagues, whose computer has been flaky in many ways, had this same problem. After making appropriate backups, try deleting the “Personal Folders” account from the account list. If it comes back, well, a rebuild (or at least a clean out and reinstall of Office) may be in your future.

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When I select “Personal Folders” and hit the Remove button, I get the following message:

“You cannot delete the account containing your mail, contacts and calendar. You will first need to create a new location for your personal data. You can create an Outlook Data File by clicking on the ‘New Outlook Data File…’ button.”

So I think I’m going to just leave it alone for now.

I’d be interested in hearing from any other Loungers using Outlook 2002:

1. In the Tools–>E-mail Accounts list, do you have a “Personal Folders” entry?

2. If the answer to #1 is yes, is it the only entry, or is there a separate entry that corresponds to your e-mail account and that is designated as the Default account?

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I have 2002

My POP3 account is the only entry included as an account and is not called ‘personal folders’ (although ‘personal folders’ is isolated as the default location for the inbox.)

As a suggestion, I’d
1 save the Outlook .pst file under a new name (outside Outlook)
2 configure a new reference to the POP3 account via Tools > e-mail accounts add
3 make the new account the default
4 blow away the bad account
5 Exit Outlook
6 copy the Outlook.pst file over the top of the just created one

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Thanks for the input. Subsequent to my previous post (and after doing my end-of-month backups) I was able to remove the “Personal Folders” account from the list, although I was forced (or thought I was, anyway) to use a more cumbersome set of steps than you suggested. Prior to my first post I had already created a new POP3 account and made it the default e-mail account (because for some reason my old POP3 account simply disappeared from Outlook a couple of weeks ago — and I’m guessing that was related to the appearance of the rogue “Personal Folders” account entry). Notwithstanding the fact that the Personal Folders account wasn’t designated the default “e-mail account”, Outlook wouldn’t let me remove it (and gave me the error message I quoted in my previous post).

To remove the account I went through the following process (more or less):

1. I made backup copies of all my .pst files.
2. Using the Outlook Data Files dialog, I created a new .pst file (Temp050331.pst) and designated it as the default .pst file. (NOTE: This is a different “default” setting than the “default” e-mail account setting in the E-mail accounts dialog.)
3. I got out of Outlook and, when I re-started Outlook, I declined Outlook’s offer to redo my shortcuts to reflect the new .pst file.
4. I believe it was at this point that Outlook allowed me to remove the “Personal Folders” entry from the E-mail accounts list.
5. I again got out of Outlook and deleted the copy of outlook.pst in the Outlook directory. (I’m not positive about the order here. I may have done this as part of Step 3.)
6. Again using the Outlook Data Files dialog, I created a new outlook.pst file and made it the default .pst file.
7. I got out of Outlook and then re-started it (again declining Outlook’s offer to redo my shortcuts to reflect the change to the default .pst file).
8. I got out of Outlook again, and replaced the new (empty) outlook.pst file in the Outlook directory with my old outlook.pst file.

That was 3 days ago, and so far Outlook seems to be behaving itself (and the Personal Folders account has not re-appeared in the E-mail accounts list).

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Tip:
*.pst files are very useful and can benefit you. The data file can be used to back up your e-mail account and allow you to access e-mails from offline.

Example: My outlook e-mail account has a storage limit and many e-mails that are received are important.

1. File > New > Outlook Data File
2. Create a .pst file and save it in a safe location.
3. You can name your *.pst file (it defaults to “Personal Folders”)
4. Now you can create sub folders on your *.pst file and drag e-mails to those folders. This will allow you to create backups of your contacts, calendars, tasks and e-mails.

**If you want to view a message saved in a personal folder while you are not connected to the Internet, select Work Offline when you open Outlook. You will see a list of your personal folders. Select the folder, and then select the message you want to read.**

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I’m with you on .pst files, and have two (outlook.pst and archive.pst), each with lots of subfolders. The trouble is, they don’t belong on the E-mail accounts list, which was my problem last month. (Cleared up now, though — at least for the moment.)

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