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problem with outlook express sending a large/huge email

Computer Aid Posted on by

A customer (for the second time in about 6 months) sent a huge email from outlook express (about 40 digital camera attachments). This causes OE to become unusable.

I figure the procedure for fixing the problem is a bit to complex to explain over the phone.

Once I’m there, I see I can start OE, but as soon as I do a send/receive, it effectively locks up.

The problem is bound to be the outbox.dbx file, so I find it at:

C:Documents and Settings{userid}Local SettingsApplication DataIdentities{LongNumber}MicrosoftOutlook Express

(substitute {userid} for your actual user id, and {LongNumber} with the name of the folder at that position (which has a lots of numbers)).

To be safe, I rename outbox.dbx to outbox.dbxx

That clears the problem

I also educate customer on how to check emails sizes, as sending images usually involves having some “technical” knowledge of image sizes, and how to reduce them by changing resolution and image quality.

nowadays, its easy to attach 10 or 20 photos from a digital camera, without realising that each photo can be 1 to 4 MB in size… leading to an email that is 10 to 80 Mb in size (which most ISPs cannot handle for various reasons).

Now thats a nice idea for a new email client: have it automagically warn you if the email is bigger than, say, 2MB, and then offer to reduce the image size for you.

Comments

problem with outlook express sending a large/huge email — 3 Comments

  1. I can’t comment on the problem directly, but it might be worth familiarising the customer (and yourself?) to IrfanView, which is a very handy (and free) image-manipulation program.

    It doesn’t take long to get the hang of it, and once mastered, your customer should be able to send images of a much smaller file size than they have up to now.

    http://www.irfanview.com/

  2. Hi marksierra

    The customer already has irfanview.

    I’m a big fan of irfanview, but this customer struggled with it… I think its great, but some people cannot get their minds around concepts like “image resolution”, differences between bytes kb mb, and why using a photo “kiosk” will generate CDs, that won’t “work” on the PC.

    In the end, the customer decided that learning to burn CDs/DVDs, and posting the disk is the best option.

  3. Try next program – fixing Outlook Express, may extract e-mails from Outlook Express dbx file, save the fixed Outlook Express e-mails on disk, move the fixed messages you have to open simultaneously the Outlook Express and the Windows Explorer, support to fix Outlook Express errors in a Batch mode, fixing of the attached files are obligatory.

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