Outlook Express

Anti-Spam Program Choices

July 29, 2008 By Terry Stockdale

Subscriber and long-time reader Scott Adler wrote to me about his experiences with three of the various anti-spam programs. I’ve used Mailwasher Pro and PopFile and like both, but they are entirely different in their approach to spam. My current choice is PopFile.

I’ve also mentioned iHateSpam, which is from the same company that offers my choice in anti-spyware and firewall programs; however, I don’t use iHateSpam because I don’t use Outlook Express or Outlook as my email program (I use Eudora).

The three anti-spam programs you speak about have quite different impact on ones PC.. I’ve been using I Hate Spam but it’s use brings a slowdown to the reaction of the computer. As the files of friends and enemies build up the computer runs slower and slower until it almost freezes up. That’s what happened to me and it took three days of agonizing trouble shooting before I recognized where the problem lay.

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Products:

MailWasher Pro full-function 30-day trial
iHateSpam full-function 30-day trial
PopFile free

Filed Under: Anti-spam, Communications, Outlook, Outlook Express, Security, Shopping Deals, Software, Terry's Computer Tips

Unable to Delete Email in Outlook Express

June 27, 2008 By Terry Stockdale

Sherrill Kerbaugh wrote about a major problem she and her husband were having on both of their computers:

Hi, Terry… We have a major problem…. My husband has been unable to delete daily e-mails for a few weeks now….we can’t figure out what in the world is wrong!?!?!?! Now, all of a sudden I can’t delete e-mails on my computer (same local area network and e-mail…Outlook Express)! HELP!!!!!!!!! Also, John can’t download or use Adobe Reader on his computer, but I can!?!?!?
We are going crazy here!

What are your thoughts? We just found your website this morning….hope you are our “computer angel”! : )
Thank you!

I wrote back to tell Sherrill that Outlook Express has a problem that will creep up on you and prevent you from deleting emails. When you delete an email, it goes into the Deleted Items folder.

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Filed Under: Email, Outlook Express, Software, Terry's Computer Tips

Emails and Spam Filters

June 17, 2008 By Terry Stockdale

Several people recently have had the emails, that they sent, fall victim to spam filters somewhere before getting to their recipients.

In one case of which I know, the email was sent to a mailing list. Many mailing list programs have filtering routines that are designed to block unwanted messages — not just blocking unsolicited commercial emails, but also blocking emails that appear to be help requests to the mailing list administrators.

Mailman, one of the more popular mailing list programs, does this kind of filtering so that all the list members don’t get the messages that appear aimed at the list owner. In particular, the filter is usually triggered by one- or two-word Subject lines in the email, especially if they have words like Help, Information, Info, Lists, Options, Remove, Unsubscribe and such.

So, what’s the fix? Don’t use a one- or two-word Subject line. Take the time to write a meaningful Subject.

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Filed Under: Anti-spam, Communications, Email, Eudora, Opera, Outlook, Outlook Express, Security, Security Issues, Software, Terry's Computer Tips, Thunderbird

Outlook Express – Problem Compacting Email Folders

May 26, 2008 By Terry Stockdale

I received an email recently from a reader who was having problems with Outlook Express. As I have written several times recently, when you delete emails, they’re not really deleted — even if you “empty the deleted emails folder.” Your email program still has the email in its data file — it has only marked the email as deleted. The next time you compact the email folders, the folder would be rewritten without the deleted email. Yury, though, was having difficulties compacting one of his email folders:

Terry,

I can not compact my Sent folder. By the end of the compacting process I am getting an error message “The folder is currently in use by Outlook Express or another application”. After closing the message the whole computer slows down, and some times I have to reboot it. I have an impression, that something is running in the background. Also, lately when I am trying to back up my e-mail on the external drive, the process running continuously 2 or 3 times and volume is in gigabytes. It all indicates, that I have old unerased messages sitting somewhere in my computer. As a result, I have problems sending e-mails. The e-mail seemingly does not leave Outbox, but in fact Outlook keeps continuously send it out, and the e-mail never shows-up in the Send folder. I had this problem before, and it always because there are to many unerased e-mails in my system. Except before I was able easily to fix it by deleting and compacting files.

Please, advise. Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Yury Ferkelman

I wrote back to Yury to tell him how to proceed:

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Filed Under: Email, Outlook Express, Terry's Computer Tips

Outlook Express Links Don’t Work

January 14, 2008 By Terry Stockdale

I received an interesting question from subscriber Maria. She has been using Firefox, as many people do, including me. In this case, she had just upgraded her Internet Explorer to IE7 and was having problems with Outlook Express.

Maria wrote:

Terry, I currently have Fire Fox and Internet Explorer on my computer. I just added the Internet Explorer as a browser after removing it some time ago. Outlook Express is my default email handler. The problem is that in Outlook Express the links don’t open since I added Internet Explorer. [Tech guy] at [a local computer shop] says that it seams like the two are competing I am hoping that you have some ideas as I have tried a few from a Google search.

Fortunately for Maria, I had seen this problem before and thought I knew the answer.

Internet Explorer 7 messes up Outlook Express’ settings if Internet Explorer is not the default web browser when it is installed.

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Filed Under: Email, IE, Operating System, Outlook Express, Software, System, Terry's Computer Tips, Vista, Web browsing, Windows XP

Outlook Express Links Don’t Work

December 21, 2007 By Terry Stockdale

Maria wrote:

Terry, I currently have Fire Fox and Internet Explorer on my computer. I just added the Internet Explorer as a browser after removing it some time ago. Outlook Express is my default email handler. The problem is that in Outlook Express the links don’t open since I added Internet Explorer. [Tech guy] at [a local computer shop] says that it seams like the two are competing I am hoping that you have some ideas as I have tried a few from a Google search.

Fortunately for Maria, I had seen this problem before and thought I knew the answer.

Continue reading Outlook Express Links Don’t Work

Filed Under: Bug Fixes, Communications, Email, IE, Outlook Express, Patches, Pre-installed Software, Security Fixes, Software, System, Terry's Computer Tips, Usability, Web browsing

Compacting Email Folders

April 9, 2007 By Terry Stockdale

There is a little trick to the way POP3 email program like Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and Thunderbird store the email messages you receive. A “deleted message” is not really deleted! Did you know that?

All your email program does is to rewrite a few characters in the file in order to tell itself that a particular email has been “deleted.”

One particular marking in the file indicates that the email has been deleted, so the program shows it in the Trash folder. A different marking shows it has been deleted from the Trash folder. But, it really has not been removed from the big email.

When I delete an email, it’s gone — right?

February 22, 2007 By Terry Stockdale

There is a little trick to the way POP3 email programs like Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and Thunderbird store the email messages you receive. A “deleted message” is not really deleted! Did you know that?

Outlook and Outlook Express store all the emails in one huge file, even if you have your emails split between multiple folders. Eudora creates a separate file for each email folder, such as Inbox, Outbox, Trash, Junk and any folders the user creates. Thunderbird similarly uses multiple files for emails.

Personally, I like Eudora‘s & Thunderbird’s approach — if I should ever have a file corruption issue with one of the email folders, I’m not in danger of losing all of my emails, just those in that one folder.

Filed Under: Email, Eudora, Optimize, Outlook Express, Security, Terry's Computer Tips, Thunderbird