cipherdelic

This was just SO COOL, I had to write about it.

Having read portions of Sally McGhee’s book on productivity using Outlook 2003, I’ve been working hard to whittle my Inbox down to 50-odd messages from somewhere in the vicinity of 2000+. I’ve managed to maintain this goal somewhat, and I’m constantly monitoring my Inbox to ensure that I don’t go over, say, 75 messages in it at any time.

The primary method I use to achieve this is the two-minute rule: for any new email, I read enough of it to decide whether it is actionable or not. If it is actionable and the action will take no more than 2 minutes of my time, I finish the task right then, and hit Ctrl-D on that message with a loud, satisfying slam. If it is expected to take more than 2 minutes, I leave it in my inbox. All personal messages get read upon opening, and, based on their contents are either deleted (message from home owners association about upcoming meeting to discuss dark stain on east wall near elevator on the 4^th floor) or moved (driving directions to buddy’s house for next Friday’s Boardgame Nite) to a Personal folder right away. Anything else gets zapped with a Shift-Delete and an evil chuckle. The upshot of following this method, then, is that my Inbox pretty much has become my Task/todo list, and my Outlook Task list is basically empty (I don’t like the cumbersome Tasks interface, but I shouldn’t  complain since they’re only at, er… version 11. I hope O12 will fix this).

Anyway, this brings me to the point of my posting: I was fooling around trying to create a new PST file to save my POP3 mail, and then realized that I can’t have my Exchange email go to one PST file and have my POP3 mail go to another – bummer. I didn’t know this until I created the second PST file, of course, and found out to my dismay that all my Outlook email landed up there beside my POP3 mail (because all accounts must use the same PST file; I don’t understand the need for this requirement. Or maybe I don’t understand the feature). In any case, I decided to do away with the second PST, and so I Shift-Deleted all the Exchange mail I thought was duplicated, from the new PST. Turns out, since this new PST had become the new default location for all my mail, all of this mail was deleted from my Exchange account as well. Wow! I realized this with a sinking feeling when I switched back to the original PST as the default, and found 0 messages in my Inbox.

My todo list had just evaporated.

That was when I had that same sinking feeling you get when you delete that last copy of your term paper, or the Russell Peters fanclub website code you hacked up overnight on your local disk.

I did have a hunch though – I’ve noticed earlier that Outlook folders have a “Process all marked headers” right click menu option. I’ve always assumed from seeing this that Outlook doesn’t really purge messages in a PST, but rather marks a header for later processing, for performance reasons. I looked at the PST file from which I had deleted all my Outlook mail, and its size (13+ MB) betrayed this fact as well.

So off I went down the rabbit hole looking for programs that could recover deleted email. Sure enough, I hit upon several commercial options that would tease you by showing all your deleted email, and then charge you 4 times your net worth to actually recover them. Imagine someone gave you a free Ferrari, and then charged you $250,000 for the key to the fuel tank lock. Sort of like that. Like a bad dream. Anywho, I poked around a bit more and found a Microsoft KB article that gave me some more clues – apparently it is possible to add a registry key to enable recovery of deleted emails in Outlook. Didn’t work for me, unfortunately. A bit more searching though, and I hit upon this page detailing an ingenious, free (as in $0.00, as in Buy None Get One Free!!, as in beer) method derived from techniques detailed by a fraud examiner in the High Technology Crime Investigation Association’s webpage. The method involved corrupting the PST file first, and then recovering it with scanpst.exe which ships with Outlook 2003. Apparently ScanPST reverts all objects to “not deleted” when repairing a corrupted file, but not when scanning an uncorrupted file. Kudos to the kind folks at techrepublic for putting up this tip. Thanks to Raihan Kibria for frhed, the freeware binary editor I used for this. Hooray for the public domain!

Now back to my todo list…