So, I know my normal readers do not come here looking for technology tips. I am really sharing this one so I can look back in a year or two when this problem hits me again.
I am out on the road visiting customers this week and attending an industry conference. Yesterday I plug my trusty Treo into my computer while sitting at a Starbucks between appointments and decide to check email. I start Outlook up and Bam! it crashes (not a real surprise to you Outlook users out there). So, I start it up again and Bam! it crashes. Uh-Oh.
For the short-term I decide to you my Treo’s email capabilities which are fairly substantial with the addition of a cool little program called Agendus Mail SSL. We also host our mail with Google, so I have a great web interface with which to access my email. Outlook serves some other pretty important functions for me so I would have to get it back up and running in the long run.
Yesterday being a typical day on the road I got back to my hotel room about 10:30pm after 15 hours out and about with customers and fell dead to the world upon contact with my pillow. Subconscious thought is perhaps the most amazing gift God has graced us with. I awoke with the answer.
I remembered 10-12 years ago when ColorMetrix was in it’s formative years that I had acted as the virtual IT department for a printing company located not to far from my home. Back then Outlooked sucked even more than it does now. It crashed all the time when email archives became quite large.
The answer is a little utility that is actually installed on your computer called scanpst.exe. It is all explained by Microsoft right here. Basically, you run this little utility and pray that your datafile is not too messed up to fix. (I also have a pretty solid backup stored up on Amazon S3 which could be a entire additional post for fellow propeller heads in my audience).