using outlook on work and home computer

[big_d]

I recently installed office 07 on a new computer at work, and is working
fine. I use office 03 at home. Prior to this installation, I used Outlook
Express on both my work on home computers. I copied my personal(1).pst file
from work on to an external hard drive, and then copied it to my home
computer and set it as the default PST. The emails intially looked fine, but
then outlook downloaded my emails (that had already been received) from the
last 2 weeks. I leave a copy of emails on our ISP server for 2 weeks. I now
have multiple copies of emails in my inbox at home. How can I avoid the
duplicative downloading of email messages. I've updated all of my software,
using Windows update. I want to be able to use Outlook at work and at home
in order to check emails from either work or home, and then copy my PST file
from work to the home computer weekly so that my PST are reasonably in synch.
I have used this approach successfully for the last 3 years with Outlook
Express.

 

[Roady [MVP]]

Does your work only offer POP3 access or also access via IMAP or Exchange?
Which method of transferring your pst-file do you use?

 

[big_d]

Our ISP at work is POP3 access only, offered through Yahoo Small Business. In
order to transfer my PST file from work to home, I copy the PST file on to a
large external hard drive on a weekly basis, which also contains other backup
information. This is a very simple process, and I've used this approach with
Outlook Express for the last few years. Is this a problem with Outlook
keeping the UIDL values in the registry rather than within the PST file?

My basic objective here is to be able to (i) use Outlook at work for all of
my email correspondence and (ii) be able to use Outlook at home to read
emails and respond from home for clients on the west coast. I also do some
work at home at night. With Outlook Express, I was able to do this, and then
freshen up my email folders at home with my work folders on a weekly basis.
I wasn't perfect, but worked reasonably well. Is their another approach that
I could use?

I'll try the steps tonight outlined in the two articles that you referenced.

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP - Outlook]]

The emails intially looked fine, but
then outlook downloaded my emails (that had already been received) from the
last 2 weeks. I leave a copy of emails on our ISP server for 2 weeks. I
now
have multiple copies of emails in my inbox at home. How can I avoid the
duplicative downloading of email messages.

It should happen only once. Each Outlook keeps track of what it has
downloaded. That data is not kept in the PST, so transferring the PST won't
let the second Outlook know what the first has downloaded. There are
duplicate removers here: http://www.slipstick.com/addins/mail_duplicates.asp

 

[big_d]

thanks.... I came up with the following solution to this problem:

If you want to synch your Outlook at home, on a notebook, or setup a new
computer with your PST file from work, do the following:

1. Do a send/receive from your work computer to update your email
2. Delete previous copies of your mail on the server. Go to: Tools,
account settings, change, more settings, advanced, uncheck “leave a copy on
server.â€
3. After the previous copies have been deleted from the server, repeat step
(2), but check “leave a copy on server†in order to keep copies of your email
on the server on a go-forward basis.
4. Copy your work PST file to your external drive
5. Copy your work PST file to the PST file used on your home computer.
This file should be the same location and name of the file used at work. You
can check the current setting by going to tools, options, data files. If you
need to change it, close Outlook, and move the file using a file manager and
give it the correct name. When you re-open Outlook, it will prompt you to
browse for the correct location of the PST file.
6. Now your Outlook at home will be the same as your Outlook at work for the
time being, and you can follow this process to periodically synch your files.
If interested, there are also add-in packages that give you more robust
synching capabilities.

- Outlook tracks the email messages received by your mail account using the
UIDL list. If you don’t delete your prior messages from the server (step 2
above), then when you copy your work PST file to your home PST file,
Outlook’s UIDL list will be stale, and it will download to your home PST file
any email messages that are on the server. You will then end up with a bunch
of duplicate email messages. You can download add-ins that will clean up
duplicate messages.
- You can also use this same approach to setup or update a notebook computer.
- If you run into problems with your Outlook account at home, it’s easy to
go to the profile, delete the old one, and create a new one with clean
settings

- One other word of caution. If you setup a new account or profile on your
computer, the default setting for “leave a copy on server†is not checked.
In order to work around this problem, you can setup your account and
temporarily use incorrect settings for incoming and outgoing mail; otherwise,
it will immediately start receiving mail before you have time to change this
setting. Check the box for†leave a copy on the server,†and then fix the
incoming and outgoing settings. Then you can receive your mail and leave a
copy on the server.

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP - Outlook]]

5. Copy your work PST file to the PST file used on your home computer.
This file should be the same location and name of the file used at work.
You
can check the current setting by going to tools, options, data files. If
you
need to change it, close Outlook, and move the file using a file manager and
give it the correct name. When you re-open Outlook, it will prompt you to
browse for the correct location of the PST file.

The rest seems OK, but I'll disagree with this part. You should never
substitute one PST for another with the same name if that PST's name is
already defined in your mail profile. You run a high risk of corrupting your
mail profile. Instead, put the copied PST in a directory OTHER THAN the one
Outlook uses by default and do give it a new name. Then, if you want to have
this new PST as the delivery location, while you can do as you say and rename
the original and, when Outlook complains, point to the new one, I'd rather use
the Mail applet in Control Panel to add the copied PST, switch the delivery
location cleanly, and remove the old PST all while Outlook wasn't running.