Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. Unable to open the Outlook window. The set of folders could not be opened.

I followed advice from a forum thread, that recommended to run “outlook.exe /resetnavpane”, but with no luck.

Then, from the command line, i tried all relevant flags found on “outlook tips: using command line“.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11>outlook /resetnavpane

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11>outlook /safe

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11>outlook /resetfoldernames

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11>outlook /resetfolders

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11>outlook /cleanprofile

At the end it turned out, that none of the above worked.. Until I shut down Microsoft Communicator!

Now, this worked like a charm:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11>outlook.exe /resetfolders

Lesson learned: Remember to shut down Microsoft office communicator, before trying to repair outlook

Today Mozilla launched their e-mail client ‘Mozilla Thunderbird 2′ just 12 days after the launch of release candidate 1! One the the main new features is tags, a feature I’ve been waiting and hoping for for many years now. I’ve never understood why none of the major e-mail client developers Microsoft or Mozilla got this into their clients before. For me it just seems so obvious. But here it is.

Thunderbird 2 allows you to “tag” messages with descriptors such as “To Do” or “Done” or even create your own tags that are specific to your needs. Tags can be combined with saved searches and mail views to make it easier to organize email.

Mac users

I recently made the switch from PC to Mac, and with that switch I also moved from Thunderbird to the default OS X e-mail client ‘Mail’ (sometime referred to as Mail.app). I made this switch for two reasons:

1. Thunderbird is a great e-mail client, but software wise it has a few bugs and glitches
2. As other Apple software, I expected Mail.app to be very well integrated into OS X

I’m very satisfied with the switch. Mail.app is very intuitive as you would expect from any Apple software. But they don’t have tags as I’ve come to love from Gmail. But on the other hand, neither has Microsoft Outlook and until today Mozilla Thunderbird.

As of this day, Mozilla Thunderbird is an even more serious player with some very powerful aces on its hand!

Do I switch to Thunderbird 2?

If I was still using a PC, the answer would be simple: Yes.

Now that I’m using OS X and Mail.app, I don’t know. I think that I will definitely try it out. This is easy since I’m using IMAP and not POP3. So I can easily switch between the two. Maybe I’ll report back later comparing the two.

If you are still not sure, I suggest you check out their ‘features‘ page to get inspired :)

Other reading

My co-blogger Jesper previously wrote an article called ‘Tags or Folders‘.

Technorati Tags: Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, e-mail, email, mail, folksonomy, taxonomy, tags, Gmail, del.icio.us, Google Mail, mac, OS X, Apple, Mail.app, usability, user interface, e-mail client, thunderbird2, web 2.0

This term has been used widely on the World Wide Web when discussing usability issues related to long webpages. Now Jason at Signal vs. Noise have brought up the subject when talking about e-mails:

But there’s another scrolling issue worth thinking about: Email scrolling. Standardized emails are too long. These usually take the form of “Welcome to our product” emails or verbose auto-responders that have one line of steak and 150 lines of sizzle.

Read the whole post on SvN…

Technorati Tags: SvN, emails, e-mails, usability, scrolling, belowthefold