That, for Princes of Denmark, and everyone else  is, of course, the question:
Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageously large Outlook profiles,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of emails,
And by opposing end them.

To what do we owe this hideous mangling of the bard’s words?  I seek to enlighten users of Outlook on this vexatious topic.  Purging here refers to the final deletion of emails that you have already placed in the deleted folder.  To use current terms it is “hard” deletion rather than “soft” deletion.  Once you have purged the emails they are gone for good – the only way back is to find them from a backup – if you have one.

So why would you purge?  The idea is to minimise the size of your Outlook .pst file, or profile.  Over time the profile grows and performance becomes sluggish.  You may experience instances of the dreaded “Outlook is not responding”.  Purging makes it all better.

You can purge manually or automatically: Microsoft tells you how.

 

 

I’ve been using Word for a long time – more than 20 years!  I recently stumbled upon a “feature” which has caused me a bit of grief over the years and how to turn it off!

This is described in a Microsoft article, on using absolute hyperlinks.

The thing is that the option to use an automatic relative hyperlink is selected by default.  So unless you un-select it those lovingly crafted absolute links of yours along the lines of http://mydomain/webthingy/index.html will get turned to files:///c:users/dopeyworduser/appdata/webthingy/index.html when you save!

Perhaps someone could point out to me the benefit of having this defaulting to “on”?  I ask this as a long time “Dopey word User” who now knows better.

Mail settings you might need when we are your email provider

 

Name of setting	Setting	Description
Full Name		Choose your sender name as you would like it to appear in messages that you send. Example: Eric Flounder
Email Address		Your email address for this account, such as flounder@flyingflounder.co.uk
Incoming mail server settings – use the bold settings
These settings are for downloading messages (receiving email) from your email provider’s mail server.
Account Type		Choose IMAP*, POP  IMAP
Description		Choose the name that Mail will use for your account, such as Job or Home
Incoming Mail Server (host name)		The host name of the incoming mail server, such as mail.domain.com. mail.flyingflounder.co.uk
User Name		Your user name is the same as your full email address as your user name. flounder@flyingflounder.co.uk
Password		The email password you use to sign in to your account. as supplied by us
Port		The port number used by the incoming mail server. Common port numbers for incoming mail are 143 and 993 for IMAP accounts, and 110 and 995 for POP accounts. Port 993
Authentication		Choose Password, MD5, NTLM, Kerberos, or None, as directed by your email provider. Password or MD5
Use SSL?		Does the incoming mail server support SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption? STARTTLS
Outgoing mail server (SMTP) settings – use the bold settings
These settings are for uploading messages (sending email) to your email provider’s mail server.
Outgoing mail server (SMTP)		The host name of the outgoing SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server, such as smtp.example.com.mail.flyingflounder.co.uk
Port		The port number used by the outgoing mail server. Common port numbers for outgoing mail are 25, 465, and 587.Port 587
Use SSL?		Does the outgoing mail server support SSL or TLS encryption? STARTTLS
Authentication		Choose Password, MD5, NTLM, Kerberos, or None, as directed by your email provider. If None, you may need the additional settings below to send email when you’re on a different network, such as from a Wi-Fi hotspot or Internet cafe.  Password or MD5
We are here, and happy to help if you get stuck!

 

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Introducing the Flounder blog, where Eric will be presenting articles, news and technical advice weekly.