The Mail control panel is a useful tool for configuring Outlook profiles, e-mail accounts, and data files:

The Office Online article “Add or remove an e-mail account” is a great resource for learning how to use and configure e-mail accounts in Outlook using the Mail control panel.

In 32-bit Vista and Windows XP, you can find the Mail control panel in the following places:

1. By searching for “mail” in the Control Panel search box:

2. Or, by right-clicking on the Microsoft Office Outlook entry in the Start menu and choosing Properties

If you are a 64-bit Vista user like I am, you may be wondering where Mail is in the Control Panel folder. Searching for “mail” in the Control Panel folder will find it (#1 from above), and the right-click method (#2) will continue to work, but you may notice that Mail is not visible in the Vista Control Panel home:

Where did it go? You’ll be happy to know it’s not gone, it’s just been moved to the “View 32-bit Control Panel Items” folder. To get there, click on “Additional Options”, then “View 32-bit Control Panel Items”:

That will reveal the Mail control panel, hiding amongst the other 32-bit control panels:

Windows moved all of the 32bit control panels into this one location for the 64bit version of Vista, and Mail shows up since Outlook is a 32bit application and does not have a 64bit version.

I hope this information was helpful. If you happen to be on a scavenger hunt where one of the items requires finding the Mail control panel on 64-bit Vista, then you’re one step closer to winning.   ;-)

Michael Affronti
Outlook Program Manager

You’ve seen several posts on the Outlook Team Blog focused on ways to help you more effectively manage your incoming e-mails and appointments in Outlook. Office Labs has also been exploring some innovative methods to help people manage the vast amounts of information they receive on a daily basis.

To help alleviate this information overload, Microsoft Office Labs released Email Prioritizer last week on www.officelabs.com. The prototype – inspired by Microsoft Research’s “Priorities” project – is an add-in for Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 that was built by the Office Labs development team here in Redmond. Email Prioritizer provides a “do not disturb” button that temporarily pauses new email arrival from ten minutes up to four hours. Email Prioritizer will also assign priority ratings of 0 to 3 stars to incoming mail to help users focus their attention on the most important email messages.

While we encourage you to test out our prototypes, they are unsupported concepts with no plans for inclusion in any products.   Please direct any feedback you have on Email Prioritizer to Office Labs at emailpfb@microsoft.com.

Thanks!

Steve Geffner
Program Manager, Office Labs

After reading some of the feedback on our post about removing items stuck in your outbox, I realized that a lot of people are trying to send some pretty large files through e-mail. Putting any issues with your e-mail service provider’s limits on large messages aside, sending large attachments through e-mail is still a bad idea for a number of reasons:

• Your recipients might not be able to receive your large files: While your e-mail server may allow you to send a large attachment, your recipient’s e-mail server might reject the message.
  
• Your e-mail might put your recipients’ mailbox over quota: Sending a large attachment in e-mail might put your recipient’s mailbox over the maximum amount of e-mail data they can have in their mailbox, preventing them from receiving other messages.
  
• Your e-mail might put your own mailbox over quota: Since each e-mail you send is retained in your sent items folder, sending large attachments to other people counts against your mailbox quota as well, which could put you over your own quota and prevent you from receiving e-mail.
  
• Attachment Bloat: When a file is attached to e-mail, it has to be encoded to be sent in the e-mail. This encoding process causes attached files to become 1.37 times larger than they were on your computer. For example, if you send a 10MB file through e-mail, you’ll actually send 13MB of data.
  
• As soon as you send it, your files will probably be out of date: It often happens that you send a file and as soon as you send it, you realize you forgot to add that one important sentence or to make that one change. Once you’ve sent it, it is too late to make an update. Your recipients’ copies will always be stale. In addition, by sending out your files as attachments, you are creating additional copies which may take on a life of their own.

Fortunately, there are a lot of alternatives for sending files to people over the Internet which avoid these problems while making sure your files get to the destination safely and securely. Depending on the type of files you want to send, the following are some of the options available to you.

All of these alternatives basically boil down to:

Put your files in a shared location and then send a link.

Sharing files with others inside your organization can be accomplished in a number of ways.

If your organization uses Office SharePoint Server and provides you with a My Site you can upload your files to your My Site’s Shared Documents library, and then include a link to the file in your e-mail message. Even if your organization doesn’t provide a My Site for you, there still may be a SharePoint document library where you can upload the file and send a link. (Ask your resident IT Professional if you have a SharePoint Site you can use.)

A side benefit is that if your recipients will always have access to the latest version, instead of a stale attachment.

Copying a link from SharePoint can be a little tricky. When you have the SharePoint document library to which you’ve uploaded your file open, right click on the link to the document, and select Copy Shortcut. Then you can paste the shortcut into your e-mail and send it.

If your organization doesn’t have SharePoint, you may have a shared file server or other location where you can copy the file and allow others to access the file without needing to send it through e-mail.

If you want to send files to people outside your organization, or you use Outlook at home or school, there are lots of other ways to share files, depending on the type of file.

If you don’t have SharePoint in your organization or are using Outlook outside of work, you can get some of the benefits of SharePoint by signing up for a free Office Live Workspace. With a Workspace, you can access and store files for yourself or share documents with other people and collaborate directly in your Workspace.

If you don’t need the full power of a Workspace, consider using a file sharing website that lets you upload any file and share those files with other people. For example, using Windows Live SkyDrive you can upload up to 5GB of files for yourself, to share with other people, or share with everyone.

If you are sending pictures to someone, consider resizing those pictures before you send them. With modern digital cameras, each picture can be 3MB or more when you download them from your camera. Consider reducing the size of your pictures and then sending them through e-mail. You can find out more information on how to have Outlook automatically resize your pictures for you on Office Online.

If you don’t want to resize your pictures, you can use any number of photo sharing websites where you can upload your pictures and then send a link to them in an e-mail message. For example, you could use Windows Live Spaces, Flickr, or SmugMug.

With video files, I highly recommend uploading video clips to a video sharing website or a general file sharing website. If your video is something you wouldn’t mind anyone seeing, you could upload it to a video sharing website like MSN Video or YouTube. If you want to keep your video private, consider treating the video like a document and using a method described in the Documents section above.

These are just some of the options you have for sending files to other people instead of attaching them to an e-mail. When you use one of these alternative ways to share files with your friends, family, or colleagues you help them keep your mailbox and theirs clean, and you can be sure that your file will be available no matter what service or program your e-mail recipients are using.

Ryan Gregg
Program Manager, Outlook

Thanks to all of you who have installed the latest Outlook Live Connector Beta version 12.1. We’ve received lots of feedback through our blog, so we wanted to recap the top questions and provide some answers all in one post.

Question 1: Do tasks and notes sync?
No, the beta does not sync tasks and notes.  We are currently evaluating whether to support task and notes sync in a future release. If you are a premium customer (meaning you have a paid MSN subscription), you can go back to using the native DAV support to get this functionality.  You can do this by removing your Hotmail account and then re-adding it using the ‘Internet E-mail’ account type in the Mail control panel.

This Office Online article details how to use the Mail control panel to modify accounts:

Overview of Outlook e-mail profiles
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA012304751033.aspx?pid=CH100622151033#4

Question 2: I get lots of “4102” errors. What are they?
There is a known issue with non-Western European character sets thhat can cause this error, and will be fixed in an upcoming Beta 2 release of the OLC.  For now, avoid categorizing/flagging your mails with these character sets.  If you are already in a state where you get the 4102 error, the easiest way to fix it is to re-sync your mailbox by removing your account and then re-adding it

Question 3: I see errors with msncon32.dll when I boot Outlook after uninstalling the OLC.
This can occur when the OLC is installed in your default profile, so the account is still present in Outlook but the OLC components are not. You can fix this by going into the Mail control panel and removing the Hotmail information manually. See the above link for instructions on using the Mail control panel.

Question 4: Does Windows Mobile sync with the Windows Live Calendar?
The current version of Windows Mobile does not support syncing with the Windows Live Calendar when it is connected to Outlook using the Outlook Live Connector

Question 5: I’m not running the Beta, but sync stopped working shortly after the Beta released.
Coincidentally, an upgrade in our server environment caused some unforeseen sync problems for the non-Beta Outlook Live Connector. You can resolve the non-Beta sync problem by either upgrading to the Beta, or trying again in a few days when the server side issues are resolved, requiring no action on your part.

We hope this answers some of your questions about the newest release of the Outlook Live Connector. Thanks for the feedback and please keep using the Beta!

Kristel Leow
Software Development Engineer in Test
Microsoft Office Outlook

New worms target both MySpace and Facebook users

Are images in incoming messages not being rendered? Do they appear when you reply or forward those messages? Check out this post on Omar Shahine’s blog for a solution.

Hope this helps,

Ellen