Once again a technical glitch has led to some significant learning about some of the features of Outlook 2016 I had not used before, mostly because I did think I had a need to do so.
The Technical Issue
The issue that triggered some minor panic was a “phantom” message that Outlook was trying to send from the primary account and producing an error every time a send/receive command was initiated. I may have inadvertently caused the problem when a message was stuck in the outbox and efforts to manually initiate send/receive commands did not work.
Attempted Solutions
I had a similar problem occur a while back and eventually the solution that worked was changing the primary account to another one and deleting the original primary account .pst file. Then installing a new account using that email address and keeping it as a secondary account.
This time, in hopes of not having to do that tedious procedure again, I tried deleting the stuck message (after copy and pasting its contents to a new message) and trying to send the new message. That did not work as it got stuck in the outbox too. I then just closed Outlook and reopened it, hoping it would then send upon startup. It did, but that is when the “phantom message” was trying to be sent and caused send errors every time. I tried taking the deleted message and moving it to the outbox, but that did not work.
I suspected the problem may then be my service provider (same as cable/internet provider) so I called them. They were unable to resolve the problem, kicked it up to a higher-level tech person, but they said their preliminary analysis was the problem was with Outlook.
Then decided I was going to have to go through the change of primary account again, delete the .pst file and start over. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of changing the name of the default .pst file to keep its contents and then Outlook simply would not startup at all. A error message came up and it was clear, after multiple tries, it was not going to work. This is what caused the minor panic.
My first idea to resolve the new issue was to reinstall Outlook, which actually meant reinstalling the whole Office 2016 suite. After doing that, Outlook still did not open.
Eventual Successful Solution
I went online to see if there was any help available through forums, and found one idea – creating a new Outlook profile – that looked promising. After learning how to do that and creating a new profile, I started by installing the email account I wanted as the primary (default) account and was relieved when the send/receive worked fine with no errors (confirming the original problem was an Outlook not an internet provider problem). I then simply added the other account .pst files as additional accounts.
Since I had backed up the various email folders, RSS feeds, tasks, and calendar I was able to restore them quite easily. Unfortunately, I had not yet learned how to export the rules I had set up, so those I had to rebuild from scratch. In the process, I have now learned how to export the rules to an .rwz file, so I have backups should I need to yet again start a new profile.
Ironic Conclusion
I was aware for years of the concept of more than one profile for email because I have used multiple profiles in Thunderbird to make it easier to organize various email accounts, but it never occurred to me the same could be done with Outlook. For some reason, I had never paid attention to the option of multiple profiles in Outlook.
I suspect one reason is my first uses of Outlook were on an Exchange Server of my employer and I was the only user of my one account so never even used multiple accounts in Outlook until probably when I upgraded to Office 2007 on my home computer way back when.
Anyway, this set of technical challenges led me to learn about profiles in Outlook, as well as saving and reloading backups of the rules via export/import. I also re-learned I had an opml file to use to import the RSS feeds. Good lessons learned.
Tech Muddler 