Reminders gone haywire

  • Thread starter Thread starter Wes Dabney
  • Start date Start date
W

Wes Dabney

I posted before, but perhaps I obfuscated the point. Every time Oulook 2000
SP3 is loaded, every reminder pops up (Approx 400).

I need to remove these reminders from Outlook 2000 without losing the
contacts that they are apparently tied to. I have not found a way to access
these reminders within outlook itself. I found in one of my searches that
MDBVU32.EXE gives absolute access to every variable in outlook, so I used
it. The problem is that if I delete the reminders I lose the conacts
associated. Please help, I have looked everywhere and no one has a solution.

BTW: I have imported very old contact backups and the problem persists.


Wes Dabney
 
Try starting Outlook from the command line with the cleanreminders switch.

outlook.exe /cleanreminders

--
Patricia Cardoza
Outlook MVP
http://blogs.officezealot.com/cardoza/

Author, Special Edition Using Microsoft Outlook 2003
Author, Absolute Beginner's Guide to OneNote 2003
Lead Author, Access 2003 VBA Programmer's Reference

***Please post all replies to the newsgroups***
 
Well, I made some progress, though, I am unsure exactly how, but I am going
to write down my procedure for posterity. I exported the entire 2000+
contact list to a comma delimited file and then used MDBVU32.EXE to delete
the unwanted reminders (since apparently no one knows how to change reminder
properties once their set, how brilliant, sorry long day). I then ran
/cleanreminders for the heck of it, even though I had just removed them all.
Closed Outlook, and ran it without any switches. I compacted the pst
thinking outlook might hold on to useless reminder data wherever it might be
stored, and then imported the .CSV and to my suprise, the 400 reminders that
usually pop right up had dwindled to 50. At this point I'm printing the list
of problem contacts in order to enter them manually because there seems to
be no other solution.My thanks to Patricia for at least attempting an answer
to my problem.


Wes
 
Weird...I've never heard of this problem before.

--
Patricia Cardoza
Outlook MVP
http://blogs.officezealot.com/cardoza/

Author, Special Edition Using Microsoft Outlook 2003
Author, Absolute Beginner's Guide to OneNote 2003
Lead Author, Access 2003 VBA Programmer's Reference

***Please post all replies to the newsgroups***
 
For a client side equivalent you can use OutlookSpy (www.dimastr.com) to get
at the hidden Reminders folder for the logged-in mailbox.

The Reminders folder is what is known as a MAPI search folder. Based on the
restriction criteria for the folder it shows all items that match that
criteria. However, items in the folder *are* the original items in one of
the default folders enabled for reminders (Inbox, Calendar, Tasks and
Contacts). So if you delete an item from Reminders it's gone from its
original folder too. You can check that by comparing the EntryID property
for each item in Reminders and the original parent folder and you will see
they are identical.

From within the Reminders folder if you open an item and change FlagDueBy,
ReminderSet or ReminderTime you will change the reminder settings for that
item in both Reminders and the original folder.

/cleanreminders forces Outlook to re-scan the four reminder enabled folders
looking for items with reminders set on them. An associated switch that
often is used in conjunction with /cleanreminders is /cleanfreebusy, which
forces cleanup of the free/busy information, which can also affect things.
Another useful switch is /resetfolders, which forces Outlook to reset it's
default folders and also reconstitute the Reminders folder.

Another useful switch related to reminders was introduced in Outlook 2003:
/cleansniff which forces removal of duplicate reminders. This one can be
real useful when cached mode ends up creating duplicate reminders.

You can start Outlook using combinations of those switches, BTW.
 
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