Outlook lost mail capability (2002 & 3)

[Mike C]

Hello,
Out of the blue outlook 2002 under XP Home has lost its mailing capability. All my xisting data remains in place and accessible, but no send, no receive, no tools>email accounts, no send/receive button, no menu items relating to any of the above.

All I get from tools>accounts is an error message saying "the operation failed due to a registry or installation problem. Please restart outlook and try again. If the problem persists please reinstall."

I have re-started and reinstalled with the same result. I have ininstalled 2002 and installed 2003 with the same result.

Any ideas please....

Thanks

Mike C

[HansV]

Have you tried creating a new e-mail profile in the Mail control panel?

[Mike C]

Hello Hans,

Its been a while........

It wouldnt let me do anything like that. However things move on. A few days ago I implemented a hotmail account, so while I was waiting for any advice, I went throught he registry and removed all entries relating to that new account (having backed it up naturally!). Now outlook has started and will let me talk to the outside world. It is not all clear, but it is at least letting me manage my accounts.

Let me get back to you when I know more about what woks and what doesnt.

regards,

Mike C

[Mike C]

Hello Hans,

Right. Outlook 2003 looks as though it is working, though it takes far longer than 2002 to start up. I have remembered you proposal that I create a new profile, but for the moment I want to understand what is going on.

Control panel>mail showed a real default working profile and three corrupt ones. By this I mean that it would not let me look at their properties and said that the names contained unacceptable characters. I found these in the registry and deleted them leaving only the default, working profile. When I try to look at data files it fails with the message "There was an error locating one of the items needed to complete this operation. It might have been deleted"

It will not show me any data files for the default profile. Is this something to do with the change from 2002 to 2003? I see that there is a choice of pst formats.

When I open outlook it shows me my 6 pop3 accounts and my hotmail account. all look and work fine (though the hotmail link is slow)

In the navigation pane it shows my real time account (mailbox.pst) lets me see the basic properties. This is in a data partition not the default location.- it is 12mb odd in size. It will NOT show me the advanced properties. It fails with a message "the operation failed. An object could not be found"
It shows me the three other pst files where I store all the messages and inspect their basic properties, but again not the advanced properties

I have scanned and repaired these files (all needed attantion)

The navigation pane also shows two entries called "Internet Folder" and one blank that it will not look at at all. It fails with "the set of folders could not be opened". I dont know where these are, but I found some ost files and some nst files. scanost.exe wont work on my desktop.

I have run a repair operation on outlook which is the only module of 2003 that I installed....

Thats it. I feel that if I create a new profile I may get rid of the doubtful entries, but I dont think I will fix the failure on inspecting the advanced properties of my real files and I dont feel comfortable with this.

Cheers

Mike C

[jscher2000]

I don't know what's wrong with your profile, but if you have any doubts about the future usability of your data files, you should consider copying their contents into a fresh PST file. To preserve backwards compatibility, you can use the Outlook 97-2002 format for the new file (as long as you do not have 2GB of data).

[Mike C]

Hello again Hans

So I just tried putting one pst file into a new profile and it read and accessed perfectly. So I have now fully populated a new profile and all is well - including the email accounts.

I do just seem to have had massive point-it-time corruption of the whole lot.

But then you thought it would be!

cheers

Mike C

[Mike C]

Jefferson,

Thank you for this tip, one of the things I mean to do is go back and see if my daily backups of the pst files are also damaged. I did indeed copy the content of my main pst file into an existing but different pst file as a safeguard.

Mike C