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Outlook shows some appointments off by 1 hour

October 21, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Well, it’s that time of the year again, Daylight Savings is about to end, and Outlook decides that some of my recurring appointments now happen 1 hour later.

Mind you, not all of them. I still have lunch appointments at 12PM, but I now have a recurring alarm to go home at 6PM instead of 5PM. That sounds like my boss is getting me to work an extra hour, but fortunately the recurring appointment “Commute to work” is starting at 8:30AM instead of 7:30AM…

Oh, and my Blackberry synchronizes with Outlook, but somehow manages to correct the braindead appointments to their correct time.

This seems to happen pretty much twice every year, ever since the US government decided to extend DST by a couple of weeks. We’ve patched all our servers and clients, ran conversion tools left and right, but it still happens. Creating a new appointment doesn’t really fix the problem – I have to wait until next week to make that appointment, and by mid-November they’ll be off again!

Luckily some Googling brought me to this post, and although it mainly discusses problems with Exchange and the Blackberry Enterprise Server, it does contain a reference to a Microsoft tool for Outlook (KB931667). To my surprise this tool was updated in August 2008 (hasn’t it been a couple of years since the change in DST?). After installing and running the tool, it found 13 appointments to fix. When I gave it the go-ahead and fix these culprits, the problem magically disappeared!

My only fear now is that I have to run this again on November 2nd… we’ll see.

Filed Under: Productivity, Windows Tagged With: , , ,

Outlook attachment reminder

August 19, 2008 By Leave a Comment

It has happened to everyone: you are composing this message, and say something like “as you can see in the attached Excel sheet” or talk about the cute picture you’ve attached, and then you forget to attach the file…

Have no fear, Outlook Attachment Reminder is here! A small but effective script will scan your message for the word “attach”, and check to see if you indeed have attached any files. If not, it will alert you, and ask you if you want to send it anyway.

If you have a signature that uses files, the script even has a provision for that!

Thanks to LifeHacker.

Filed Under: Productivity, Windows Tagged With: , , , ,

Spam filtering in Windows Outlook

March 3, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Over the weekend, our company’s spam filter decided it would no longer filter spam. Naturally, this never happens on a weekday, so this morning everybody’s Inbox was overflowing with Viagra and Rolex offers… and the lucky few who have a SmartPhone got all that spam earlier than the rest of us.

Since the corporate spam filter was a piece of crock anyway (I won’t name names because it was Symantec), I decided to look around for a good Outlook spam filter. I came across SpamBayes.
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Filed Under: Productivity, Windows Tagged With: , , ,

Outlook refuses to open messages attached to another message

December 21, 2007 By Leave a Comment

I ran into a problem with Outlook the other day. Someone sent me a message, that was a forwarded message from someone else. Only, the forwarded message was attached, instead of quoted. And Outlook refused to open the message. Double-click, Right-click & Open, Right-click & Save, nothing worked (although Save gave me a beautiful .msg file – that Outlook refused to open).

After searching the Internet for a couple of days, seeing all kinds of references to security levels and warning messages (that I didn’t get – Outlook didn’t give a peep hen trying to open the message), I gave up – I only get one or two attached messages a month, and most of them are jokes.

It got annoying however when I decided to use the GTD Outlook Plug-in. In this plug-in, you have the capability to attach several messages to a Task. The message that initiated the Task is quoted in the task description, and subsequent messages are attached. I couldn’t open these attachments, and to make things worse, the GTD Plugin moved the messages that I attached to an undisclosed location, so I couldn’t find these messages anymore!

So, back to searching the Internets. I finally came across this message on Tutorials Win. It described a similar problem with Outlook 2007 (I’m still using 2003), and said that Google Desktop was to blame. That made sense: a couple of days ago Windows Vista informed that Google Desktop had unexpectedly quit. The forum post suggested disabling the indexing of Outlook, but for me, the only thing that worked was completely uninstalling Google Desktop.

Everything works fine now, I can access my attached email messages again. I’m sure I’ll miss Google Desktop, though…

Filed Under: Productivity, Windows Tagged With: , , , ,