What to do if Outlook devours the contents of your exchange server.

With a new job comes a new mail setup. Now that I'm at a place where everyone is using Outlook to do mail and the other things that Outlook does, I had cause to jump on the wagon of bandness. The mail is served through and saved on an exchange server of some kind. I know not the technical details, I just know that you can access things through the web or through any number of local clients. For some reason, each new machine I used had outlook set up in such a way as to delete mail from the server once it was done downloading it. If I were only using one machine, this would have been fine, but I'm not, so it wasn't.

I tried a whole bunch of stuff, but eventually, the winning combination used to make sure that each machine synced up to the exchange server and no messages were deleted was roughly as follows.

• Back up your mail through outlook's import/export utility.


• Export to a file


• choose a .pst file


• choose the top folder and make sure to check the subfolders option


• choose name and location and save the backup file


• Delete your mail account through the Windows Mail control panel


• Delete your Mail Profile through the same control panel (different tab)


• Make a new profile


• Make a new e-mail account


• Choose Cached Mode


• re-import your mail from the exported file

That _should_ be everything.