Ask DACS
January 2014

Moderated and reported by Jim Scheef

Ask DACS is a Question and Answer session before the main presentation at the monthly General Meeting. We solicit questions from the floor and then answers from other audience members. My role as moderator is to try to guide the discussion to a likely solution to the problem. The answers below include my own post-meeting research.

Q – I have several email accounts set up in Microsoft Outlook. Is it possible to copy all of this configuration information from one copy of Outlook to another of the same version? Office 2003 actually provided a utility to backup and restore such configuration information, but newer versions do not. There is no procedure that is officially supported by Microsoft. A thorough search of the Registry finds none of the email account information.

A – This was my own question and it prompted much discussion. Several people suggested locations in the C:\Users\<username>\AppData folder. There are three folders that contain configuration data: "LocalLow", "Local" and "Roaming". Outlook 2013 on Win8 places the email data files in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Outlook so it would seem logical for the Outlook configuration to be in there as well, but even adding an email account and then looking at the file dates failed to find this well-hidden configuration data. I did this using the Mail applet in Control Panel so Outlook itself was not running. This process created a new ".ost" data file where the mail will be stored when I run Outlook, but no other file in the Outlook appdata folder was changed. I've also searched on slipstick.com, an Outlook and Exchange support site, without success. This problem remains unresolved.

Q – I heard that it may be possible to change how Outlook connects to an Exchange Server which may improve performance when downloading and synchronizing email messages. Is this true?

A – The short answer is sometimes. Outlook versions prior to 2013 used RPC (remote procedure call) to connect to an Exchange server. This works extremely well when both computers are on the same network. RPC is not a secure protocol and is blocked by firewalls, so in older Outlook versions (prior to 2003) a VPN (virtual private network) connection was required to allow a remote machine to securely retrieve email. As remote connections became a necessity, Outlook 2003 added a means to connect over HTTPS, allowing a secure connection (encrypted using SSL) over an untrusted network (the Internet) without the complexity of a VPN. In Outlook 2013 the HTTPS transport is now the default because more people are connecting over Wi-Fi in a business setting and the wireless connection may not always be secure. The easy cure is to always use the encrypted HTTPS to ensure privacy. In a local office, reverting to RPC may give a slight performance boost but the change will be very small. Network speed will be a much bigger factor in perceived performance. The setting is in the "More Settings…" dialog on the Connection tab.

Q – I receive an email with attachments and when I send this message on to another person, the attachments are sometimes lost. Why is this?

A – The standard behavior is to include attachments when forwarding but not in a reply or reply all. The logic here is that a reply is going back to the sender of the original message, and that person already has the attachment. If you want to see a history of the emails in a conversation, Outlook places your outgoing messages in the "Sent" folder. If you put all of the emails in a conversation (both sent and received) in an Outlook folder, you can sort the messages by date and time to see the history of the discussion and this would include the attachments to each email message. A member added that newer Outlook versions offer an option to "Show as Conversations". Checking this option (on the View tab in Outlook 2010), brings up a dialog to "Show messages in conversations" in all folders or in the current folder. Another member suggested the "People Pane" which normally displays below the Reading Pane. Further exploration of these features is left to the reader.

Q – I just started using my new Windows 8.1 computer and I set up SkyDrive. How do I keep all my computers synchronized using SkyDrive?

A – This is exactly what SkyDrive is designed to do. When you have set up SkyDrive on two or more computers using the same Microsoft account, all of the files within the SkyDrive folder will be copied to the SkyDrive server. SkyDrive is built in to Win8.1 and can be installed on Win8, Win7 and Vista. XP is not supported. You must log in to your Microsoft account for the synchronization to take place. There is a setting in SkyDrive setup to log in automatically each time you start Windows. Personally I keep all of my current document files on SkyDrive (about 8GB of "stuff"). The Libraries feature of Win7 and Win8.x make it easy to create folders in SkyDrive for documents, photos, music, etc. If you are not sure what files are actually on your SkyDrive, open the SkyDrive website (skydrive.live.com) to view the files currently stored "in the cloud". You can find the downloads and setup help information in the SkyDrive area of the Microsoft website.

Questions for the upcoming meeting can be emailed to askdacs@dacs.org.

Disclaimer: Ask DACS questions come from members by email or from the audience attending the general meeting. Answers are suggestions offered by meeting attendees and represent a consensus of those responding. DACS offers no warranty as to the correctness of the answers and anyone following these suggestions or answers does so at their own risk. In other words, we could be totally wrong!