Tips For Cleaning Up Your Mailbox

Mailbox Cleanup buttonAre you reaching the limit of your mailbox storage quota or simply want to get rid of some clutter in your mailbox but don’t know where to start? This is the guide for you!

While there is no single “holy grail” method in storing your emails, the strategy used for cleaning up your mailbox effectively are much more generic and can be used for pretty any storage method you use.

In addition to having that “cleaned up” feeling, there are also technical benefits to having a tidy mailbox such as faster loading of Outlook, less clutter in your Search results and quicker backup ups since the mailbox to backup is now smaller.

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Enabling/Disabling Cached Exchange Mode through the Registry

Cached Exchange Mode is new in Outlook 2003. If makes a local copy of the Exchange Mailbox. The benefits of enabling this is reducing network traffic, faster responds time of the Outlook client (especially with large attachments), being able to use the Junk E-mail Filter and being able to work off-line.

When you create a new profile in Outlook 2003 Cached Exchange mode is enabled by default.
When you upgrade from a previous Outlook version with an Exchange mailbox to Outlook 2003 Cached Exchange mode is disabled by default.

This makes it really hard to determine and control remotely whether your clients have Cached Exchange Mode enabled.

Enabling/Disabling Cached Exchange Mode can be controlled though the registry. This allows you to enable/disable it with a simple logon script to create a standard in your organization without the need of forcing the recreation of the entire profile at start-up or visit each client.

Cached Exchange Mode is controlled by the following key;
[HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\<ProfileName>\13dbb0c8aa05101a9bb000aa002fc45a]

00036601     (REG_BINARY)

enabled value;  84 01 00 00
enabled with Public Folders/Favorites: 84 05 00 00
disabled value; 04 00 00 00

Please note that the “00036601” registry key stores more connection settings that just wether or not Cached Exchange Mode is enabled. The values above are taken from a new mail profile with only the Cached Exchange Mode setting changed. If you’re going to deploy this registry key I recommend taking the value from a properly configured machine for your environment


Allow or prevent Automatic Forwarding/Replying to the Internet

Automatic Replies and Forwards buttonAs a secure default, Exchange doesn’t allow sending automatic forwards and automatic replies to the Internet.

This is mainly to prevent any unintentional mail loops, which users can create by using message rules in Outlook, which directly forwards the message to an external address or replies to the sender of the message with a template.

Additionally, it also prevents emails from automatically being forwarded almost unnoticeable when an account gets compromised and a message forwarding rule is created by the attacker.

This article explains how Exchange Administrators can change this behavior via the Exchange Admin Center (ECP), Exchange Management Console (EMC) or Exchange PowerShell commands (EMS).

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Adding sound or scrolling text to an email

Add Sound buttonIt seems like such a nice way to cheer up a birthday email or a Christmas wish; Add some background music and scrolling text.

This all used to be possible in Outlook as well up until a security update took the feature away a long (long!) time ago. At that time, Outlook was still very much a business email client and Microsoft never bothered to implement a new and secure way to do this again. Granted; Many other email applications do not support (and may never had supported) these features either.

Now that these features are gone, you are left with some workarounds and alternatives to achieve something similar but to be honest; You pretty much have to find new creative ways to cheer up your emails.

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Outlook 2013 / 2016 / 2019 / 365 and Word HTML

Word HTML buttonStarting with Outlook 2007, Outlook uses only the Word engine to display and create HTML-formatted emails. There had been quite some fuss about this before its release and again before the release of Outlook 2010.

So what is this really all about? Well, to put it short; because it breaks some stuff… But really, trust me, it’s not completely a bad thing that it does so.

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Signature appears to be double spaced

Line Spacing buttonHave you ever encountered the following?

When you compose a message, the signature shows correctly but on the receiving end it sometimes shows double spaced.

This is because the ENTER key can be interpreted differently between composing the message and actually showing the message in HTML. This often depends on the style and formatting defaults of various email applications.

Within HTML there are different tags for creating a new line or a paragraph (the double spaced line). When you press ENTER the HTML editor will create a new paragraph. To create a new line you must press SHIFT + ENTER.

 Key CombinationIn HTML Code
New LineSHIFT + ENTER<br>
New ParagraphENTER<p> </p>

Error opening attachments / Cleaning out the Temporary Outlook Files folder

Can't Open Attachments buttonWhen opening an attachment directly from within Outlook you could get an error message saying that it can’t create the file and to that you need check the permissions on the folder you want to save it in.

In most cases the permissions on the folder isn’t the issue but the fact that the folder is “full”. When you open an attachment directly from within Outlook it will first save a copy to a subfolder of the Temporary Internet Files folder.

Cleaning out the folder will solve the issue.

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What is the Winmail.dat file and how to prevent sending it?

Winmail.dat buttonThe Winmail.dat file holds information for the Rich Text message format.

When you send a message to someone whose mail client doesn’t support Rich Text format (basically any other mail client which is not developed by Microsoft) or when it is improperly converted on the mail server, they will receive the message with the Winmail.dat file as an attachment.

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Recover a forgotten PST password

You may at some time have password protected your pst-file but by now completely forgot what the password was and can no longer open it and get to your data.

In that case, there is some bad news and some good news;

  • The bad news is that Outlook’s password protection method is really weak.
  • The good news is that there multiple tools, including free ones, to quickly generate a recovery password or remove the password protection altogether.

Continue reading: Recover a forgotten PST password