Alternatively, anyone know a REALLY good flower shop in Philly?

March 12, 2008 6:41 PM

I borked my SO's exchange account. Help me unbork it before work tomorrow.

My girlfriend is staff at a local school which uses exchange. This school's exchange server has a webmail interface (the official OWA exchange piece). I attempted to configure her [home PC's] outlook 2003 instance to connect to this exchange server using the OWA URL. Outlook cried that it couldn't connect to the exchange server, but I canceled past the failure messages and told it to use proxy exchange access.

Bad idea. Her messages downloaded, but to her local mail store. Now her exchange account on the server is EMPTY save for new messages. This is bad. Assuming I can (with her help) ninja onto her school's wireless network by daybreak and connect to the exchange server the legitimate way, how do I get those messages back onto the server?

posted by datacenter refugee to computers & internet (7 comments total)

You might be about to put a pst of the messages on a USB drive, plug the USB drive into a school computer, and then import the pst back into her Exchange account via Outlook.

Or you could tell the school sysadmin and ask for help, but obviously this might create other problems.
posted by Argyle at 6:50 PM on March 12

If you can get on the school's wireless couldn't you just export the stuff into a PST from Outlook, take it on a laptop, connect to the Exchange server once you're on the wireless, mount the PST file in Outlook and copy all of the mail back into the mailbox? I think this should work in theory. Maybe I'm missing something.
posted by saraswati at 6:53 PM on March 12

Some institutions "lock down" the workstations pretty tightly, or otherwise lock down Outlook/Exchange to prevent access.

To clarify what others have said, a PST == "Outlook Data File".
posted by QuantumMeruit at 7:03 PM on March 12

Thanks - Im familiar with the PST - in fact I've even identified where the messages are on the machine. My question is *how* to get the messages back out of the PST and onto the exchange server. When I first created the account it warned me that it would store messages locally, but that I could change this once connected. Where exactly is the place that I can change this? If it matters, she's using outlook 2003.
posted by datacenter refugee at 7:29 PM on March 12

If you can't get her connected to the Exchange server from home (directly, not through POP3) you need to put that .PST file onto a USB drive. She can take it to work and plug it into her PC, open Outlook, connect to the Exchange server, then open the .PST file (File > Open > Outlook Data File), drag all the emails out of the .PST archive and drop them back into her Exchange folders.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 7:35 PM on March 12

In fact, I would copy that .PST file onto a USB drive or CD immediately (regardless of what else you do), since that may be the only copy of her mailbox that exists right now (depending on the reliability and regularity of her IT department's backups).
posted by mr_crash_davis at 7:37 PM on March 12 [1 favorite]

Can you connect via IMAP? Then you can drag the stuff back in. No one will be the wiser.
posted by damn dirty ape at 8:41 PM on March 12 [2 favorites]