I have 9 different email accounts set up in Microsoft Outlook (mostly free Google Apps IMAP accounts), and while it works great for receiving and replying to messages, I have found myself often sending from the “default account” in Outlook rather than the account I meant to send from.  The reason is that when you compose a new message, if you do not select the Account, it uses the default one.

I really wanted to force Outlook to prompt me for the account to use when sending email, but after some searching, it appears that is not possible.  Maybe it will be in the next version of Outlook.

The best option I could find was to set up deferred delivery in Outlook.  This cause Microsoft Outlook to delay sending your email for a specified number of minutes (I chose 5 minutes).  While this is not an ideal solution, it does allow me to quickly go in and change the ones that I remember - usually right after I send them.  So, it’s better than nothing, plus it allows me to pull back emails that I may have written too hastily as well.

So, it was bound to happen… We removed the wrong user’s mailbox in Exchange Server 2007 today.  Unfortunately, with Server 2007, removing an account, removes the Windows user object and also marks the mailbox in the database for removal.  Luckily, there is a relatively quick fix:

1. Restore the Active Directory object with the AdRestore utility
2. Connect the disconnected mailbox to the restored user account

Step 1
First, we downloaded the AdRestore program from Microsoft onto our primary Active Directory server and then ran the command:

> adrestore -r username

The program searches through recently deleted (tombstoned) objects and allows you to recover them.  The username part works as a rudimentary search.  If it finds the object, it prompts you to proceed.  Once you do, the account is restored.  It’s disabled and doesn’t have a password, so you’ll need to set the password and the activate the account. Microsoft has a long drawn-out article on restoring Active Directory accounts, but running this simple tool seemed to work fine for us.

Step 2
In the Exchange Management Console, we went to Recipient Configuration -> Disconnected Mailbox and went to find the deleted mailbox.  Oh crap! It wasn’t there!  Luckily, it turns out that if the mailbox management process has not yet run, you will not see recently deleted mailboxes.  Fortunately, you can force this by going to the Exchange Management Shell and running:

> clean-mailboxdatabase “Mailbox Database“

After running this command, the disconnected mailbox now appeared.  You then right-click on it, and select “Connect…”  Check “User Mailbox” and click Next.  Then, select “Existing User,” browse to find the user, make sure their Alias is correct, and click Next. Clicking Finish reconnects the user’s old mailbox to the restored user account.

The reconnection looked like it finished quickly, but we found that it took about an hour for it to fully connect and allow the user access to her email again.  Hope this helped!

These are two useful Windows commands that I use frequently:

1. shutdown -r -t 1
   When you use Remote Desktop Connection to connect to a Windows XP or windows Vista PC, the reboot option is not available on that PC. Well, often times you need to reboot the PC, so using the command above will do that.  The “-r” option tells the PC to reboot and the “-t 1” tells it to reboot in 1 second rather than the default 30 seconds. No reason to wait around, right? Running shutdown /? will give you a list of ll the options available.
2. net statistics server
   Running this command on a Windows XP or Server 2000/2003 machine will give you a number of statistics, but I most often use it to determine how long a machine has been running since its last reboot. (Like the uptime command on Linux.)  This does not work in Vista but if you run the task manager, you can see the uptime in the Performance tab under “System.”

As I said, these are two that I use frequently and that may be helpful for you too.

All of a sudden, Quickbooks 2009 would no longer email invoices.  It started failing with the error “Quickbooks cannot connect to the remote server because part of your company data is currently in use.” In addition, I could not print to a printer nor could I even open the “Printer setup…” menu.

I found this tech article about the problem and proceeded to follow the steps to make the PDF converter compatible with 64-bit versions of Windows.  I rebooted my PC and when I re-opened Quickbooks, I could get into the “Printer Setup…” menu.  However, I got the error, “You cannot print directly to the QuickBooks PDF Converter. Try using QuickBooks Save as PDF menu option.”

I was about to go look this up, when I checked the printer setup options again and restarted QuickBooks. When I restarted, everything worked fine. I’m not sure what that was, but it seems to be working fine now.

Hope this helps.

One of our clients was having a problem with email messages sent from a colleague’s Blackberry always ending up in her spam folder.

To resolve this, we added Blackberry’s IP address ranges to our spam filter’s whitelist IPs.  Here are the IP address ranges to allow:

206.51.26.1-206.51.26.255
193.109.81.1-193.109.81.255
204.187.87.1-204.187.87.255
216.9.248.48-216.9.248.52

That seems to be a comprehensive list.