It Ain’t The Vault

Are you using Outlook or Outlook Express as your primary email program? If you are are you treating them like a safety deposit box, all of your business and personal email neatly tucked away in folders and files where you can at it at a moment’s notice and lay your hands on all of them?

Then you are in deep trouble.

Outlook and Outlook express are great email programs, but they ain’t the vault. They will given half a chance delete your email, eat your messages and not care a whit if you are sitting in front of your computer weeping bitter tears because all of that mail is gone.

And they won’t tell you where it is. Oh it’s there. You can do a search for .pst files and if you are lucky you’ll get a clue where Outlook has vanished your precious files to, but don’t hold your breath.

Outlook was designed back in the old days when hard drives were measured in Kilobytes. Yes, Kilo, as in one thousand and boy was that hard to live with. You had to move everything off to floppy discs or if you were really Geek material you had a tape backup you could run and save all of your mission critical files.

The Guys at Redmond decided that you couldn’t be trusted to clean out your mail files every so often so they added a “feature” to Outlook. Outlook compresses and archives your email files and cleans out your email files and stores them somewhere else on your computer.

That’s right it doesn’t ask because email is a temporary location and most people won’t want anything in that file after they read it anyway. Aren’t you glad the engineers had such insight?

Don’t believe me, do a quick search on the Internet for disappearing email and see what comes up.

http://ask-leo.com/the_contents_of_my_inbox_disappeared_can_i_recover.html

http://www.outlookpower.com/issues/issue200405/00001283001.html

That’s just a coupla I found when doing a look see. There you have it on the basis of competent authority, it happens.

So what do you do?

Backup your email. If it is important to you and you might need it again sometime don’t leave it in the hands of Outlook. Copy it to a Word file and save it to your hard drive. Yes, I know with all of the files on there you don’t have any room to spare, but then maybe you should take a look at all of the stuff you’ve downloaded from YouTube and see if you really need Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You Babe” even though it was your song back in the days when you were going bare foot and dancing in the park and property was a crime and that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

You do need your email, but save it where it won’t go away, It take seconds to copy anything which is really important and you’ll be glad you did and Sonny and Cher need their freedom so let them move on to bigger and better things and if you have the urge to dance bare foot in the park remember it’s fall in Oregon and you might just get frostbite if you do so maybe fuzzy slippers and something hot to drink and an old black and white show on the Tube is a better option these days, so kick back, relax and let those Angels make the world a safer place for you and me.