Tech Support Journal

User complained that there is an error whenever he starts Outlook 2007. Vista prompted something about Outlook or application has stopped working & suggested to check online for a solution. When he does that, the result was that there were no solution available.

Re-installation of  Office 2007 does not help. Uninstall & reinstall also doesn’t seems to work. From the Email Accounts option, it seems that he has two email accounts set up in his Outlook. We decided that it could be one of the accounts that is causing the problem.

Solution is we exit Outlook & then go to Control Panel, Mail option & before even deleting the accounts, a prompt came out about having incomplete information in the email account we were intending to remove. After filling in all the appropriate information & restarted Outlook & the problem disappeared.

There will be times when you require automation of a telnet session. Although telnet program is considered to be an insecure method to connect to a device, there will be situation where you will need to use it, eg. telneting to your router, mail server etc.

The tool can be downloaded here, however we cannot support you on how to use it since we are the author but we’re making it available because it is getting very difficult to locate a copy of it elsewhere on the net.

Telnet Scripting Tool

We use this particular tool to automated opening of ports on our router only at certain time of the day & then closing those port automatically after the required time range. This would minimize hack attempts from outside of the network & reduces dictionary style or brute force type of attack from succeeding.

An example would be creating a text file (eg. create.txt) consist of the commands that you like to send to the router as follows;

192.168.1.100 23
WAIT “User :”
SEND “Admin\m”
WAIT “Password :”
SEND “poiuytr\m”
WAIT “=>”
SEND “nat create protocol=tcp inside_addr=192.168.1.106:3389 outside_addr=0.0.0.0:3389 \m”
WAIT “=>”
SEND “config save\m”
WAIT “=>”
SEND “exit\m”
WAIT “Connection to host lost.”

Create a batch file (eg. nat.bat) with the following line;

tst10.exe /r:create.txt /o:createout.txt /m

Set a scheduled task on your server to run the above batch & then set another task to delete the nat port mapping by done nat delete instead of create with the same parameters.

This script above is actually for Alcatel ST510 routers, thus it may differ from various models & makes. You may need to amend it accordingly. Basically, the WAIT is command to wait for remote to return & the SEND is the command to send to remote. The \m is the carriage return command to send to remote.

Other use of this tool would be for testing of your web, SMTP or POP3 servers which could save you a lot of typing.

There is a reason why some administrators prefer to set POP3 mail retrieval in Outlook to leave a copy of the emails on the server & subsequently deleted it after 5 days or more. This is to prevent emails getting lost when your Outlook prior to 2003 reaches it 2 GB limit in .pst file size.

If your pst file reaches 2GB, all subsequent receive attempts will remove the emails from the POP3 server but the retrieved mails doesn’t reach your inbox. In event that you have reduced the size of your pst file, those mails prior to the date where you’ve reduced the size will be gone for good.

On some systems when the pst file reaches 1.8GB or more, Outlook may not be able to open it. In some instances, using scanpst.exe may help but it will only be temporary. Outlook will crash again within 1-2 days unless you start archiving the older mails immediately.

If that doesn’t work, you can try downloading the PST/OST Cropping Tool which will truncate the corrupted pst to a smaller size. Some data lost may occur due to the truncation.

kb296088

If by reducing the file size of your .pst file still doesn’t allow you to recover your mails, you may need to go to your system Control Panel, click on Mail icon, create a new profile with a new pst file. Import everything from your old pst file into this new profile.

This should work in most situation.