Like a hurricane on the horizon (which, fortunately, we’ve managed to avoid this season), Internet Explorer 7 is getting closer and closer. In fact, if reports are to be believed, IE7 is about the make landfall in the next few days — and it’s coming to your PC whether you want it or not. In this important article, we show you how to prevent it from automatically installing.

OutlookPower reader John Dunigan has an interesting complaint. Microsoft has disabled certain sound functionality in Outlook 2003 SP2. That’s because the sound capability was written as an ActiveX control and ActiveX control is great, big, open security nightmare. But John wants sound back. We have some ideas.

Last week, we ran an article entitled "When all else fails, rebuild your profile". In it, we attempted to answer Ian Steptoe’s answer about why his POP3 email settings seemed to be continually corrupted. Ronald Goers, an engineer at XEROX, sent us the following, very interesting insight. He’s noticed that anti-spam programs sometimes muck with Outlook’s profile settings. For details on what’s happening, you’ll have to read this article.

Outlook is a complex beast and when something fails, it’s often difficult to figure out what’s going wrong. In this article, we’ll take a look at a weird problem one of our readers experienced and how, when all else fails, you might want to turn to Outlook’s profile to fix the problem.

Ever wonder where Outlook stores all its information? You might think it’s in the PST file, but Outlook actually drops its load all over your hard drive. If you’re saving, backing up, or recovering files, it’s probably a good idea to know where to find all of Outlook’s droppings. In this article, we’ll clue you into the secret locations you might not know about.

We get a lot of books in for review here at ZATZ. Most of them aren’t for Outlook, though. So, when The Microsoft Outlook Ideas Book came in, we had a lot of ideas. This is an interesting book. Read our review to find out if it’s for you.

What do you do if Outlook won’t send or receive. One of our readers had this problem and we’ve got a few possible solutions.

This week, rather than provide one long answer to a particularly vexing Outlook problem, we’ve decided to gather up a few recent letters to the editor and present them for your reading pleasure.

We’ve recently gotten a few letters about how to move your PST file data from one PST file to another. If you’ve been using Outlook for a long time, it’s likely you’ve got an old-format PST file that has a 2GB limit in storage capacity. If you’re running close to that limit, you might want to use the new PST format that became available with Outlook 2003. In this important article, we present a tutorial on combining PST files.

As developers and administrators, we often see our mail systems as never-ending lists of action items, user complaints, hand-holding, and ongoing maintenance. Sometimes we forget that our email systems can also be very special.