By Francine Otterson
OutlookPower Magazine's Answer Team at the San Diego Outlook User Group responds to a question regarding Outlook reminders not appearing.
Tony Brusk writes:
Whenever I set a reminder in Outlook calendar, it never pops up at all.
Outlook reminders are designed to help remind people of upcoming meetings and tasks. The reminders can be turned on or off, and customized as to when you want to be reminded.
Typically, a person is reminded of the meeting or task via a pop-up window. However, there can be a number of causes if a reminder pop-up isn't received. Follow along below as the San Diego User Group and I address a number of those causes.
To begin with, the Outlook program itself controls reminders, and must be running in order to receive those reminders. Make sure your Outlook program is running in order to receive reminders.
Secondly, reminders are only activated from within the primary. The Calendar or Task reminder must be in your primary folder, the primary folder being where you receive your messages.
For example, if emails are received in a personal folder (the primary location) and a Task reminder is set up on the Exchange mailbox location, the reminder wouldn't be received because the personal folder is set as the primary, not the Exchange mailbox location.
Thirdly, the reminders folder could be damaged or contain corrupted reminder items. This can be resolved by doing the following: Quit Outlook and select Start->Run. Type "outlook /cleanreminders" (without the quotes), and select OK. This should clean any corrupted items from your reminder folder.
Finally, if you're running on Microsoft Exchange Server, it's possible the message store is damaged. Create a new mailbox on the server to resolve the behavior. However, before going this route, check all of the above on the client (Desktop) side first.
