Tread lightly

Gee I didn’t post anything yesterday. You’d think I was majorly busy or something wouldn’t you?

I do have to come up with a way to recommend people stop doing something in Outlook. You see every week, I write up a “Tip of the Week” and send it out to all of our staff. Mostly it covers PC, database and other techie tips. This week I have finally decided it’s time to say something about those people who use the “deleted items” folder in Outlook as a holding bin for stuff instead of creating new folders and filing items away.

Of course, any time you tread into the area of telling people how they should use email, you are best advised to tread lightly. People live and die by email, (At least they feel like they do) and trying to convince them to do something differently is usually a fool’s errand. On the other hand, I’m sure the tech support people can vouch for me that accidentally deleting something from any other folder and accidentally deleting something from the deleted items folder are two very different animals, and these folks who keep their email stored in that folder, inevitably, will delete something by accident! Since we do not have an email server, we use POP3 for internet and MS Postoffice for internal, once you delete something permanently, it is gone for all intents and purposes. There are no server copies of email. It’s all stored locally unless the user was bright enough to backup their .pst file to the file server on a regular basis. At this writing I have 2 people doing that, and I’m one of them, despite numerous recommendations.

Given the response to those recommendations, my fear of offending people is probably overblown. People are going to do what they want when it comes to handling email, there’s not much I can do but throw out recommendations and hope one or two of them actually follow them!

I wonder if other tech support folks have found email to be a highly touchy subject with users? I wonder if it’s because people see their business email, wrongly, as a private, personal thing?

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