Outlook revisited

It never improves.

Today, I foolishly decided to correct my Outlook configuration.  You can have any number of .pst files associated with an account, but Outlook will keep its main outlook.ost file for holding the calendar, notes, tasks, journal, contacts and the rest of it.  When you set it up for the first time, it will gleefully pounce on the first e-mail address (and associated .pst file) that you add as the default, and that cannot be easily changed.

Not too much of a problem if you only have one account and it's an Exchange account; more of a problem if you have a bunch of accounts, of varying types, on more than one server.

Oh, and Outlook won't let you use the .pst file associated with an IMAP account as your default Outlook delivery location (I think because an IMAP account is e-mail only, and doesn't have all the other bits).  If you have a secondary Exchange e-mail account it will grab that, which is no good if it's not your primary account (or if, as in my case, it's in someone else's organisation - I need to be able to see it and send from it, but I don't want to be sending from it by default, and I certainly don't want my own org Outlook details mixing with those of the client org.)

If you get caught like this, first things first - go into Accounts and remove everything.  E-mail addresses need to go before their respective data files.  IMAP data files will be recreated, so there's actually no real point keeping them, unless you want to check that everything has synchronised correctly.  The default e-mail has to be removed last, and you may have to close Outlook and go into Control Panel > Mail > Profiles and do it there.

[Aside: if you have moved your Windows profile, say to another drive, you will have Outlook files in both places.  The default outlook.ost file will go in <new drive>\<profile>\Documents\Outlook Files, but all the mail .pst files will go in <old drive>\<profile>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook]

Go into the above locations and delete (or move to a subfolder if you're feeling fragile) all the .pst and .ost files, with the exception of the outlook.ost.  NB: if you have POP3 data files, back them up first, unless you know you've a copy of emails on the server!

If you have no non-Exchange main org e-mail, create a new base account - I used an admin account.  Open Outlook and configure this account for POP3.  Outlook will then configure this as the default, meaning all the contacts, calendar etc will be within your organisation, associated with an e-mail address you control.

Add back the IMAP accounts.  Outlook will create new data files for them and synchronise - there seems to be no way of changing the location to pick up the old versions.  (Sort of makes sense given that the local versions of these are more of a cache than an actual mailbox - the live mailbox lives on your mail server.)  When they're all in place, you can pick up the saved data files from the subfolder one at a time, and make sure synchronisation has run OK and that you have all the mail.  (If they're POP3 data files, this may be the only copy of these mails you have, depending on the server.)  Once done, the old files can be deleted or (certainly in the case of POP3) kept as a backup.

Lastly, add in any non-organisation IMAP accounts.  Name them such that they group.  Add in any non-org calendars.  (Will need a separate post on that because I can't remember how I did it!)