No mail in Outlook inbox after Win10 upgrade

[Haole Boy]

Aloha fellow Technibblers. Upgraded a customer's machine from Win 7 Pro to Win 10 Pro 1909. Everything seems to have gone OK except for Outlook. When I open it, there is nothing in the Inbox. No error messages of any kind. I checked his account via webmail and he definitely has both unread and read items there.

Note: This is Outlook 2007. Yes, I know it's out of support, especially on Win 10. But, this is what the customer has. I would prefer to make this work rather than try to sell him an upgrade.

So, where do I start? I've run SCANPST several times, and always get the same error message in the log file:

!!AMap page <@218924032> has csFree of 120, but should have 255

Googling only produces results advising to run scanpst, or try a new Outlook profile, which did not seem to work in the items I found.

There appear to be two PST files that get opened when you open Outlook. One is 209 MB and the other is 955 MB. I'm not sure why there are two PST files getting opened.

The other strange thing is the name of the larger PST. Not sure if it's significant, but it looks like this:
Outl<email_address_of_user>-00000004.pst

I really hate Outlook cuz everytime I touch it, I get stuff like this. Would greatly appreciate some assistance.

Mahalo,

Harry Z

 

[Sky-Knight]

I've had Win10 upgrades eat Outlook profiles a fair bit, just head into the control panel, nuke it and reconfigure it. If he's POP3, you'll have to import his PST file, it's still there. And the configuration you describe? That's not normal... Outlook 2007 uses Outlook.pst buried in %appdata%\local Settings... so this thing was messed with to begin with.

BUT, configuring that mess is a liability, no security patches for a long time now. Better to reconfigure using IMAP on Thunderbird, or upgrade.

 

[britechguy]

I agree with @Sky-Knight about not reconfiguring Outlook 2007 unless the client absolutely insists.

If they insist, though, if they were using IMAP access previously you should be able to just wipe the slate entirely clean, set up their single e-mail account again, and all will be well. If they were using POP (heaven forbid) it gets a lot more complicated.

Thunderbird or Opera Mail are both very good free mail clients. Depending on one's attitude toward the gray market, MS-Office (including Outlook) can be obtained at far less than full price for versions at least through 2016, and I'd imagine that soon enough 2019 will hit the gray market as there will be plenty of machines being retired that had it installed. It would be up to the client, though, as to whether they would wish to enter the gray market or not, knowing the risks involved (which, to me, are minimal with a bit of due diligence).

 

[Porthos]

I push Emclient.

 

[Sky-Knight]

I push Emclient.

I always forget about that gem.

 

[glennd]

I push Emclient.

I am yet to find a decent free client that allows any number of accounts other than Thunderbird.

 

[Markverhyden]

Well, hopefully you made a full disc image backup before this wonderful event. One thing I'd try is taking the PST's to another box and see what happens when you try opening them on a different copy of Outlook. I'd also, for grins, trying importing them into eM Client and Thunderbird.

 

[Haole Boy]

Thanks for all the responses. Much appreciated.

Creating a new Outlook Profile did not fix the problem. So, I installed emClient. Email now works! But... no contacts got moved over. Kinda important to this customer.

Tried using the ostpst viewer program which has saved my bacon before, but I don't get the contacts there either.

I made full disk backups using both Macrium Reflect (Free version) and Drive Snapshot. Decided to try to create a VirtualBox VM using the Macrium image. It's loading now - rather slow since the image is on a USB drive.

Will update with what happens.

Oh, I also figured out that that strangely named pst file has the older email stuff. There is a separate archive.pst so I don't think it's an archive, but I'm no Outlook expert

Harry Z

 

[Metanis]

I had a client running huge PST files and constant issues with Outlook. I referred him to Lisa at Call That Girl and we're all a lot happier now.

 

[Porthos]

Decided to try to create a VirtualBox VM using the Macrium image. It's loading now - rather slow since the image is on a USB drive.

If you get it loaded in a VM.
Click on file on the toolbar and select import/export.

In the new window select export to a file.

Choose Comma Separated Values (Windows).

This will backup your contacts to a single file that can be imported at a later date by selecting Import from a Comma Separated Values (Windows).

 

[Sky-Knight]

So... who here wants to take bets this client doesn't actually have a contact list, and is instead miffed their autocomplete list is missing?

Which no... you can't import that into another mail client.

 

[Haole Boy]

So... who here wants to take bets this client doesn't actually have a contact list, and is instead miffed their autocomplete list is missing?

Which no... you can't import that into another mail client.

@Sky-Knight wins the prize! Exactly what I found. I could not get the restored image to boot in VirtualBox (I'll pursue questions on this in another thread). So I tried using his PSTs on my Win 10 machine (I still have Office 2007 too). Outlook came up, and there was mail in the inbox, but no contacts. Finally took an image of the Win 10 on customer's machine, and restored his Win 7 image. Same issue. Took quite a while to figure out the nickname file stuff (had not run into this before). But the nicknames were not working when I tried to compose an email.

Found NirSoft's NK2edit program and was able to export the .NK2 file to a CSV. According to a post I found on the eMClient support forums, you can import a CSV file. Not sure if it will end up in "Contacts", or in whatever equivalent of nicknames emClien has, but I'll be giving this a try later today.

Again,

Mahalo nui load for all the assistance!

 

[Haole Boy]

I had a client running huge PST files and constant issues with Outlook. I referred him to Lisa at Call That Girl and we're all a lot happier now.

How do you get in touch with her? When I go do https://callthatgirl.com/ I get a page where I can purchase her latest video, but there is no way to contact her listed.???

Harry Z

 

[Metanis]

How do you get in touch with her? When I go do https://callthatgirl.com/ I get a page where I can purchase her latest video, but there is no way to contact her listed.???

Harry Z

From her latest newsletter...

612-865-4475 or lisa@callthatgirl.biz

 

[Markverhyden]

How do you get in touch with her? When I go do https://callthatgirl.com/ I get a page where I can purchase her latest video, but there is no way to contact her listed.???

Harry Z

You can also PM @callthatgirl on here.