If you know about computers put your hand up (page 2)

drwtsn32

My company is penny wise - pound foolish.

Lame. Email is has been a "critical app" for businesses for a while now. To continue to use a home type solution is ridiculous! Losing email data is unacceptable in this day and age.

Finally-Free

Did I say how ridiculous using Outlook Express is in a business environment?

This can't be emphasized enough. In any environment I've supported email was considered mission critical. I've never seen a business use Outlook Express, and I even discourage its use for home users. Even a small business, at the very least, should be running a MS Exchange server, regular backups, and have an archiving strategy.

As for Macs, I got one recently. It performs well, but is not without it's quirks. I've had no problem with the operating system (yet) but I've had some applications cause me a few problems.

W

Priest73

LouLou,

DrW prolly gave the bestest most cuddly answer yet. Download a shareware/freeware mail archive reader. there are a bunch out there.

BTW if you're company is so cheap, they may as well use gmail. atleast it backed up. Suggest that to you IT dude. That'll really piss him off.

noni1974

I don't know how to use outlook express. I tried to use it on my other computer but I messed it up so I can't use it at all. I use Yahoo and Hotmail for email. I just bought a brand new laptop last week. I don't know how to set up outlook express so I don't plan on using it anyway.

kurtbethel

Without wading into whether to us a Mac, Linux, Gmail, Eudora or any other options, consider the data itself.

I have a 2 device rule about important data. Keep at least 2 copies of important data on at least 2 different devices. More is better, offsite is even better. Besides the local machine, you have optical media, thumb drives, external drives, servers on the local network, remote servers and online storage. Storage is cheap, or free. Lost data can be beyond any price.

It would be tragic if I lost my photos from a trip or event because they were only on one machine that went to the big data repository in the sky. Do not let that happen to you, even if you have to outwit a dim wit IT droid.

Outlook Express my ass!

Elsewhere

Find a job at a company that has a real IT department.

uriah

Here is a link you may find helpful:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/community/columns/filecorruption.mspx

You could try getting your IT guy to run Mdeamon email server, its less expensive than Exchange and less bloaty and has a cool web interface as well as an outlook connector - for a few pounds more.

Hope this helps.

SnakesInTheTower

I do not use Outlook in any form. When Microshaft tries to download "updates" for Outlook, I don't allow it.

Answer to questions 2 and 3 yes.

Answer to question 1. there are commercial and free versions of software out there that are called dbx readers that would assist you in recovering email files. The commercial version I seen was under $30 per license...but your company should buy it not you. As to the freeware versions, just be careful. Either way, it doesn't sound like you should be messing with those programs..your idiot IT guy should be... and since it is business related, all of that should have been backed up on mirror servers every night. A good security protocol is for IT to have the system take a "picture" of your hard drive (and the network drives) once a day and store it off site each day...so it can be restored if something goes awry. Apparently this is not happening at your place of employ...penny wise pound foolish indeed.

Yeah, you probably should upgrade that hard drive. 40GB is nothing these days. At the very least as someone said, back up your important files. A USB thumbdrive is cheap and easy to transfer data back and forth. (although a proper IT department would block access to USB ports for security reasons to keep business files from walking out the door).

I use an old version of JUNO email for my home and have ever since the Beta version of 1.0. I have literally thousands of emails saved...but there is a point in which the file that holds all of them does get corrupted. Then it just dumps all of the individual files into one file and then it is hell to sort. I found that problem went away when I upgraded from a 40GB hard drive to a 250GB hard drive. Hasnt crashed in 2 years....knock on wood. I back up but not often enough.

So hard drive size might be part of the problem...constantly overwriting old files... solution: pimp slap your IT guy. ...just sayin'.

Snakes ()

truthsetsonefree

Some thoughts: First off I'm sorry for your loss. Second what is said here is accurate, particularly sacolton's comments. I have also found the following principle helpful. Backup, backup, backup. The more your data changes the more frequent the backups need to be. Also, some email accounts allow you to leave so much archived that if you tell Outlook Express to leave messages on the server, you may find you haven't lost anything. This works well for gmail and Yahoo. A company though will rarely allow this so if this was a work email you may have lost most of your stuff. But it may be worth checking. At my job until about a year ago people kept tons of stuff on the company server. If you need help on backup, I'm sure any of us "geeks" can give some good advice.

Isaac

unclebruce

LouBelle said:
NO i'm not using the "cup holder" I'm not THAT stupid. jesus....

I'm only here to hear more about the mac.

I'm undecided between the anti-virus of a 13" apple and the portability of a 10" Wind.

unclebruce

ps: yes Outlook is total crap even when set up by so called experts. I sometimes run a friend's guesthouse and he gets a pile of spam every day. Even hotmail is vastly superior.

If you know about computers put your hand up

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