Office-365

If you are importing about 25GB of PST file into Outlook Classic, here’s some notes for you1. Remember to run scanpst.exe over the exported PST several times before you import. It’s usual for scanpst to take several passes. Go until it finds no problems. This is a good practice to do especially on large PSTs. Also remember to increase the size of the PST via registry updates to make sure Outlook can handle PSTs of upto 100GB (50GB is the default), if you expect the final size will be bigger than 50GB. Of course, there are risks to using a PST greater than 50GB, be aware of them. On a 1Gbit line with SSD on the computer, it takes about 30 minutes to fully import the PST locally. It will then take anywhere from 4 to 16 hours for Outlook to push all the emails into the Cloud. During this time, there might be hours where your inbox in Outlook WILL NOT show the latest emails. It looks like when importing such a large PST (we had about 100k emails in it), the synchronization process is so heavy that even inbox doesn’t show the latest emails. However, the web version and phone app will show those emails. If in doubt, always look at message trace in Office 365 admin portal. If you have another machine with the same Outlook profile (say a user with two computers, after the machine into which the PST was imported fully syncs up with the cloud, downsyncing the new emails to the other machine is pretty fast. If they have good bandwidth, the downsync will happen within an hour or two.) It’s always better to do large imports during the evenings because Office 365 might throttle the import during the day. 😨

If your Office 365 mailbox is getting close to 50 GB and you’re considering enabling archive mailbox, read on. When you turn on archiving, technically called “In-Place Archiving,” it creates another mailbox in the user’s Outlook with its own calendar. And the most commonly cited assistance page does not really tell you about the split unless you thoroughly read it and click on the section entitled “Instructions for end users” towards to end. To make matters worse, all emails and calendar items that are older than two years are automatically moved from the main mailbox into the online archive mailbox. Yes, two years is the default. There’s no alert during the enablement, either. Why they thought two years is enough as default is beyond me. If you realize you made a mistake, there is no revert button or a straightforward process to undo it. Pretty unbelievable. And even if you change the archiving duration to, say, 5 years or 7 years, it will not revert any of the changes. It applies to all calendar items and emails from the point archiving was turned on. Users who are used to checking their calendars and emails on their phones now have to take the extra step of looking at what is effectively another mailbox. And sometimes, the Outlook mobile app does not even show the online archive at all. (I hear the feature to show online archive was added only last year.) So now, you have a split mailbox, with emails and calendars in two different places and no quick way of going back. But you can go back. The following is a somewhat manual process, but it will work.

You just bought a shiny new printer, say an HP, and you want to set up Scan to Email so that when you scan from the multifunction device (printer/scanner), you receive an email with the scanned attachment.