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Yeh, it’s obvious if you think about it.

Once it dawns it’s easy to see why Microsoft has done users such a disservice. Leave all that MS competition stuff with Sun, Netscape et al, out of the argument, just strictly on technical terms we’ve let down something rotten.

I think the real problem is that M$ makes lots $$$s when users don’t understand the problem. These file issues are quite technical for many and nearly everyone goes to ground when they

Sorry for the delay in replying, I

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Keely, I find myself agreeing with you. If I could change things easily then I would, but in practice, it’s generally quite a struggle. Nevertheless, you’d be surprised how many organizations aren’t that much different to the one I’ve have portrayed.

The people that frequent this board are probably better organized than many of those who don’t. However, it always amazes me how bad some the proponents of IT technology are when it comes to housekeeping. IT people are often of a breed that says ‘do as I say and not as I do’, and I don’t exclude myself from this on occasions.

To your points: “How about remote access?”

No! They don’t care about the email shambles (the lovebug virus got through without effort) but the firewall is so tight that NeoTrace Pro can’t even find the site!

VPN–there is one but security strictures preclude its use in conjunction with ordinary emails so it tends to be bypassed for most business.

“Or how about something like GoToMyPC on an outsourced model
data.”

Security issues again would preclude this approach. (I’m not offering excuses here, the fact is it’s difficult. Messages between me and head email guy have included phrases where I accuse him of having an IQ lower than his mail server. The only thing that this achieved was to make me feel better.)

Your comments about my use of Outlook I agree with. But what is the alternative if Exchange and Outlook are the basis of the corporate mail system? I don’t use Outlook unless I’m on corporate machines, I use Eudora but this also has limitations. Any suggestions for a better package would be welcome but before you offer here’s the recent list that aren’t totally satisfactory: Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Pegasus, The Bat, VMail, MailNavigator and of course most of the integrated packages.

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Thanks everyone for your feedback. Here’s a few thoughts to push the discussion a bit further. I’ll start with Mark’s point:

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Oh, but I thought that didn’t matter with the /MBR switch as this worked only on the boot record and that’s before NTFS starts. Ok, you’re probably right, I’m just not sure anymore. There are other versions of non-Microsoft ‘FDISK’ I’ve used previously that overcome some of these limitations. I’ve had to use them perviously for similar problems with Linux partitons (which FDISK didn’t recognize either), if I recall correctly they worked ok.

My word it does and there’s about 4000 of us at it too.

It happens whenever people are on the road and also work from home. You must realize that any organization where some of the mail is ‘owned’ by the staff and is not considered corporate property then this has to happen. (There is an Exchange server too but most people don’t want their personal and laptop mail stored on it. Oh, and very few of them use IMAP accounts on their home PCs.)

For example, I receive say 20-40 emails at home at my personal email address every day, some personal, some work-related, and I process only a few (or perhaps none one evening) then I’ll forward all of them to my work email address. During the day a similar number of work-related emails also arrive. That afternoon I have to take a flight that’ll keep me out of the office for a few days, but seeing I’m running late the mail I redirected from home doesn’t get processed nor does most of the mail that arrived in the office that morning. I redirect all of them (both work and home mail) to my work’s CompuServe account, grab the portable and collect the mail from the hotel several thousand miles away.

In the meantime, both my home and work accounts are redirecting mail to the mobile CompuServe account through “Out of the Office Auto reply”. Whilst away, I only attend to urgent emails (home and work), these are replied to and together with cc-ed or bcc-ed copies are forwarded to both work and home TOGETHER with forward-copies of original incoming email, which in turn are cc-ed or bcc-ed to both work and home addresses respectively at a later time (in case some mail has been lost).

When back in the office and at home most important mail (but not all) is processed as some mail is hard to distinguish from the junk and spam. Then a compilation including junk mail put on CDR a for later sorting. These CDRs will move with me from one location to the other, six month I may accumulate perhaps 20 or so. In the meantime, the work server is collecting more mail, which I then back up, again onto CDR for easy access whilst I’m out of the office. I also forward the mail to my workshop in a nearby building that has another email address altogether. As I spend about 50% of work time in the workshop location for days at a time then all the mail has to accessible there too (everything is repeated here– perhaps continued is a better word).

Six months later (in this case 15 months) I’m trying to correlate all the mail for a particular activity to obtain a contiguous block file for auditing purposes. By this time the laws of exponentiation, compounded by PST file bloat, and I have accumulated many gigabytes of data to sort.

This sounds rather messy and it is. But it wouldn’t be if there was one simple command in Outlook which did the following: “Of all the mail in these files keep only one copy of each mail item but attach a list of all its distribution copies (cc, bcc, forwards backups). This would simply be called ‘archive mail’.

If you don’t work like this you’re very lucky indeed. Welcome to the real world! Great shame Microsoft hasn’t the foresight to think of something would actually improve the product in my work environment rather than reduce it.

Finally, I was talking to the IT manager at another organization several weeks ago only to find that I’m not alone. In fact he’s got a similar situation but in some ways it’s more complicated than mine as he has to manage Lotus Notes in some locations and Exchange in others but much of the other practices are very similar.

The specific version is NAV for Windows 2000 Workstation 2001.

In this case it was my machine and I was logged on as Administrator. And I’m always loading and testing programs on it. In fact, the O/S gets a clean installation every 4-6 weeks to purge it of rubbish DLLs etc. This reboot problem has nothing to do with a bad installation however, as I can recreate it every time, clean or dirty system.

I’ve explained the problem in more detail in my reply to Keely, check it out.

Thanks for your comments.

“Is this occuring in a corporate environment with Norton being rolled out on a company-wide basis

I’ve done that already and I found two smallish files that were repaired but these weren’t the ones to which I’m referring.

Hopefully all the dups will have the same modified date and you can mass delete them.

Unfortunately this is not the case as mail would automatically be forwarded through about three or four workstations and the relay would depend on which station I was at and when. For example mail would be forwarded to my home if I’d not have finished with it and vice versa, so dates, whilst a good guide, are not the total answer. In each location mail would collect and later be consolidated into one archive file of mammoth proportions. This problem is not uncommon. The main problem is deleting the duplicates from a typical file (PST is say over 1.5GB) with the relevant data (i.e. one only of each) amounts to less than 300 MB. Manually deleting them by editing out when the duplicates can be between 0 and about 10 copies is a pain and takes many hours. The fact that the program has no heuristic email duplicate finder to find clones including forwards, cc, bcc and copies to oneself, copies with minor and major time differences and backups is an utter disgrace and it no wonder why Microsoft comes in for such criticism when its shoddy proprietary code can’t be maintained.

If you r-click on the folder name and choose properties > folder size, what does it say for folder sizes?

The biggest one says 286763K it’s a compete disk worth of data but there are smaller files down to several MB in size.

Logons shouldn’t affect the data in the pst – only the actual access to the pst.

That’s what I don’t understand, reasonably large files (say up to 5MB) can show nothing in the folders and yet they are not passworded nor encrypted, but just compacted (but not reused since the compacting)show data when viewed a hex editor–I can read my own emails this way but Outlook is useless at seeing them. Perhaps others should check to see if their ’empty’ PSTs are actually so.

There is no published specs on the psts

I come from an environment where every second word was ANSI, ISO or IEC. I’ve already said it. It’s unacceptable to have one’s data held to such ransom. As bad as Eudora is at least one’s mbx files are in plain text. That’s where I want all my PST files when I’m finished.

You can try some of the extraction utilities at slipstick.com, look for house keeping utilities. Duplicates: add the modified date to the view and sort by it. Hopefully all the dups will have the same modified date and you can mass delete them.

I’ve been there and time might force me to run with them. It appears they’ve reverse engineered the PSTs or paid Microsoft dearly for the privilege for something that should have come with the package in the first place.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

No, and I’ve just checked, filter is off. I wouldn’t expect any filtering either as Outlook is a ‘new’ install (Office with sp1) specifically installed for this clean up.

Office 2K usually lives on the machine but I reinstalled it from scratch to put Outlook on as the previous installation didn’t include Outlook.

(I normally don’t use Outlook unless I have to–when working in corporate environments etc.–on my personal machine my default mailer is Eudora. The purpose of this exercise is to consolidate the old PST emails and convert the relevant stuff to MBX files.)

I had a similar problem with a HP Scanjet 4c.

My machine had 3 SCSI cards, 2 of them an Adaptec 2940U2W and the other an Adpatec 2920. From time to time and without rhyme nor reason the scanner would be invisible to the SCSI system (but the scanner would work in the 2940U2Ws). It was intermittent and nothing I did seemed to fix it. The problem was that it was unreliable and I’d never know when it would go faulty.

Eventually, I upgraded the motherboard (which was not faulty, I just wanted a faster system, from 500MHz processor to a 1,400MHz one), everything else remained the same and this completely fixed the problem.

It seems that the 2920 may be critical in its PCI timing configurations becasue this is the second time I’ve had a problem with it. Before I put the card ino the machine whose motherboard I upgraded I tested it in a test machine and it was faulty (intermittent) in this one too. At the time of the testing I just assumed the problem was that the test machine had been fiddled with too much and the BOIS probably needed resetting.

The first two motherboards were MSI (both different) and the new one that the card works with is a BioStar M7V1B. I don’t have the MSI board details immediately to hand.

Even if you are using NTFS I would have thought that FDISK /MBR would have still fixed it.

The reason being that if you boot from a floppy with both a DOS system and FDISK on it then you’ve got the whole maintenance environment on the floppy, seeing that you’re modifiyng the boot and partitioning areas and not the NTFS it should still work.

Can someone whose actually done this please clarify it for us.