Easy Answers

I was having trouble with my e-mail at work the last few days. Outlook gave me an error message every time I wanted to delete an e-mail. And with the amount of spam we get, there is usually plenty to delete, approximately 50-75 e-mails a day. I asked our computer tech and he responded that I should run the "detect and repair" function in Outlook, but that I needed to make sure to have the Microsoft Office disk when I did so. I ran "detect and repair" twice. Nothing doin'. Still couldn't delete anything. Hmmm...

I IMed a friend of mine who works at a Help Desk. She sent me a link, and did some kind of magic where she was able to take control of my computer from her office. She could move my mouse, type stuff, run programs. It was way cool. But didn't work. She determined that my .pst file was corrupted. She didn't want to try to rebuild it since she didn't know our system. She advised me to call our IT guy.

Around this time it dawned on me that I had a lot of deleted messages in my "deleted items" box. Upon inspection, there were approximately 20,000 e-mails in there. Oops. I cleared them out and, voila! I am once again able to delete e-mails. AND I now set up Outlook to permanently delete e-mails when I close Outlook. No more problem. If only I had looked for the easy answer initially. (It doesn't matter - I was still proud of myself for figuring it out in the end.)