Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

I've been having a problem for (I'm guessing) a few months that I finally resolved and I'm posting it here as a warning. The problem occurs in Outlook 2003 but may also occur in later versions.

Symptoms

I'd start composing an email in Outlook 2003 and save it to the Drafts folder. I'd return to it some time later, make a few changes, then click Send. I only noticed a problem when someone replied and included the original message which was not what I sent, but instead the text from when I saved the first draft.

After some experimenting I determined that after doing the first save, any other changes were discarded, even if I did another save. Even if I made changes and kept the email open, what was sent was the original draft.

Cause

After a lot of searching I determined that the problem was caused when Internet Explorer was upgraded to version 11.

Resolution

To date, Microsoft has not supplied a fix, however, by telling Outlook to use Word for editing emails rather than the native Outlook editor I was able to eliminate this annoying problem.

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Member Avatar for Ancient Dragon

Are you at work or at home when that happens? If you're at home why not just use Thunderbird? I'm guessing you don't have that option at work.

Member Avatar for Rik_

Another case of microsoft software not being compatible with microsoft software. Try it with chrome or firefox, I bet you won't have the problem with them.

Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

I use Outlook because I like the built-in calendar. As far as I know, ThunderBird does not have this feature.

Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

@AD - I took another look at Thunderbird and found a calendar extension. It looked like I could get off Outlook using those. However, once I installed Thunderbird I started having problems. Whereas Outlook makes it easy to move data files, Thunderbird complicates things to no end. I tried to go through the convoluted process to create a profile on my D drive (which is never touched when I restore a system image). Then, when I imported my Outlook files it imported them into the profiles folder on my C drive.

When I created procedures at work to do things, they were step by step linear procedures. The process from Thunderbird to move a profile consists of several pages containg links that fork into several other pages, each with not quite complete information. I understand that these procedures must account for varying operating systems and different versions of the same but it would have been a simple matter to state something like

Windows 7 Profile

Copy %APPDATA%\Thunderbird\Profiles to the new location

Under the given procedure the link "Profile Folder" takes me to a page that takes me to a page that takes me to a page that says In the Windows Explorer window that opens, choose Thunderbird → Profiles. Each folder in this folder is a profile on your computer. It is ambiguous as to whether I should be copying the entire Profiles folder or a specific profile folder under that (which is given a meaningless name).

I am concerned that once I migrate to Thunderbird I could end up losing all of my archived emails on a system restore.

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