outlook from office 365 64 bit, windows 10 64 bit. Nothing ever archived, and never use offline/cached mode (knowingly at least)
Out of the blue, outlook wont open in normal nor safe mode, always says "Microsoft Outlook has stopped working" then closes itself.
I have about 10 email accounts setup, which include two proper exchange (for work obviously), one hotmail (because you need one to use windows), and all the rest gmail (private). I probably have 100k of emails in the inboxes and sent items, as that where
I leave them so I Can easily find them using the search function.
I can open word and other office programs.
I have wasted so many man hours due to outlook bugs and problems if there was an alternative, I would be using it.
Anyway, there isn't, so now to spend time trying to fix till it fails again.
Step one, delete the OST files. (from C:\Users\yourname\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook) This is very painful, as there are 10 of them and they are all about 5GB. IT is going to take days to download them again. It would be great if you
could just rename them to .ost.bak, see if it works, then if not rename them back but this doesnt work (tried it), it creates new files an starts from scratch again.
Anyway, didnt help. Now I have days of downloading to look forward to, if I can get outlook working again.
Step 2, repair pst files. (It would be great if MS could fix whatever is causing corruption, or automatically detect/repair problems)
This requires finding, then running scanpst.exe. I found no less than 3 copies of this, so I can only hope I have the right one. I choose you,C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\scanpst.exe
Frustratingly, after you scan one file, the program closes itself, so you have to find it and run it again for each file. As the start menu search thing doesnt allow you to recall last command, so top tip is to open a cmd box and enter the above command
with double quotes around, then you can use the up arrow to re-launch.
In my case, after 40 minutes of work it only found "Minor inconsistencies", which I chose not to repair due to the high likelihood of it destroying my life further than it already is. All the pst files were last modified about 8 months ago, which makes
no sense. Also, why are there pst files when all my accounts are, and have always been, imap or exchange (no pop)?
Step 3. Contemplate death and/or moving to mac. I dont like macs particularly , but in my 4 mac years, I had relatively few issues with mac mail, and it has that AMAZING feature that it shows all your inboxes as one inbox. This would save
me hours a week, as every half hour I have to find, and open 10 sub inboxes to check each one in turn. I must be crazy to continue like this.
Step 4. Anyone?
I have found in the past microsoft support to be "have you switched it off and on again" with the mantra "create a new profile, and call us back in a week" even for web apps! No, I want to fix it in my profile. Call me old fashioned.
My big worry is my contacts. I put all my 1000 vital contacts, which are my private and business life, in my hotmail account. If outlook somehow corrupts or deletes these, and syncs this back to hotmails servers, I am completely stuffed.