MailWasher Pro Tips and Solutions
From CastleCopsWiki
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MailWasher Pro Index
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There is a collection of tips and solutions to issues raised frequently at the MailWasher Pro Troubleshooting / General forum. These tips and solutions are provided in addition to the official MailWasher Pro FAQ.
[edit] How do I create a Debug Log?
In MWP click on Help then About.
Tick "Enable extended error logging to data directory" box in the help screen.
If you are looking for a specific problem it may make the log easier to read if you turn off automatic mail checking and check mail on startup in the options menu.
Restart MailWasher® Pro
Do whatever is required to create the error again. If it is only on one account check only that account; if it is from sending mail just send mail. The goal is to get just the error in the log so it is easy to find.
Once you have generated the error/problem again:
Restart MailWasher® Pro
Click on Help then About
Open the bottom link found there to where MailWasher® Pro stores the Data Files
There will be a file called MailWasherPro_debug.txt.
[edit] How do I get technical support from FireTrust?
Prepare an email that includes the following information:
- Product Version number (found in the Help|About dialog box).
- Operating System (Windows XP, Me, 2000 etc...).
- Email client software (Outlook, Eudora, Pegasus etc...).
- Internet connection type (dial-up, DSL, LAN etc...).
- Name of your Internet Service Provider (ISP).
- Other running software (Nortons, AV, ZoneAlarm etc...).
- Be sure to attach your MailWasherPro_debug.txt file.
Send your technical support email to mailwasher@firetrust.com.
For late-breaking or updated information, refer to the instructions at the bottom of the MailWasher® Pro Support page.
[edit] How can I disable MWP Startup upon Windows Restart?
What you are going to do is disable the MWP startup on a system boot. Then you will reboot your computer and verify that MWP did not load.
Go to the 'START' button on the lower left of the 'TaskBar'
Click 'Start' and when the Start Menu opens click 'Run'.
When the 'Run' dialog box opens, type msconfig into the 'Open:' box and press ENTER
After the 'System Configuration Utility' opens find the 'Startup' Tab at the top of the Dialog box (right side) and click Startup.
You will find all the programs that your computer is set to run at startup here. Go down the list till you find 'MailWasherPro' and uncheck the box.
Click APPLY and then CLOSE.
Reboot your machine.
When your machine is finished rebooting, MWP should NOT be running.
[edit] What critical files should I backup?
MailWasher version 5.0 and above maintains files specific to each user. Sometimes these files can become corrupted if the operating system shuts down while MailWasher is updating them. Key files that you can copy to a backup folder to ease recovery from this event are found in the MailWasherPro directory (Click Help, About, and the link at the bottom of the screen. Then exit MailWasher)
Create a folder called Backup and copy the files
- filters.txt
- blacklist.txt
and the whole folder called
- Training
If ever you lose any of these files in the future, you can copy them over from your last backup.
[edit] My Learning Tool is broken, what now?
Note: These recovery procedures apply for other symptoms, including high CPU usage and MailWasher shutdown problems.
If your Learning Tool starts to become less accurate or becomes completely confused you may have an error in one of your three training files. These files were moved and the training.dat was renamed trainingMA.dat in version 5.XX so follow the correct version of the instructions below based on your MWP version.
Here are two procedures for resetting MailWasher's Spam recognition learning. There are two degrees of resetting the learning, the first will not lose very much of the recognition ability, but may not be enough to resolve the problem.
Warning: The second will reset all the learning and you will have to start teaching MailWasher again:
Step 1 - For version 4.XX Open the MailWasher data directory, in MailWasher Pro click Help >> About >> click the blue link to where MailWasher Pro stores the data files.
Now exit MailWasher, make sure MailWasher is closed not just minimized.
Delete the 'training.dat' file, then open MailWasher again. When MailWasher starts and finds the training.dat file is missing it will rebuild the training.dat file again from the two corpus files: 'Training archive - legitimate.rot135' and 'Training archive - junk.rot135'. This may take some time, so wait for a while before getting MailWasher to process or check mail.
Step 1 - For version 5.XX Open the MailWasher data directory, in MailWasher Pro click Help >> About >> click the blue link to where MailWasher Pro stores the main data files, change to the "training" directory to access the version 5.XX training files.
Now exit MailWasher, make sure MailWasher is closed not just minimized.
Delete the 'trainingMA.dat' file, then open MailWasher again. When MailWasher starts and finds the training.dat file is missing it will rebuild the training.dat file again from the two corpus files: 'Training archive - legitimate.rot135' and 'Training archive - junk.rot135'. This may take some time, so wait for a while before getting MailWasher to process or check mail.
Step 2 - For version 4.XX or 5.XX If that doesn't improve things, it may be that the corpus files themselves are corrupt. Close MailWasher and then delete the training.dat or trainingMA.dat file along with both the 'Training archive - legitimate.rot135' and 'Training archive - junk.rot135' files and restart MailWasher. This will begin the learning process from the beginning fixing any problem.
To avoid this problem you should close MWP before you exit Windows rather than just shutting Windows down and having it close MWP, sometimes Windows does not allow time for MWP to finish processing and the files are damaged.
You can make a backup of the 'Training archive - legitimate.rot135' and 'Training archive - junk.rot135' files in another directory if you have this problem often enough to warrant that. Exit MWP, delete all 3 training files and copy your backups back to the MWP data directory and the training.dat file will be recreated.
Note: Version 5.XX does not use the three training files in the main data directory and you can safely delete these unless you are planning on reverting to version 4.XX at some point.
[edit] What Firewall ports do I have to leave open?
Make sure your firewall/security suite is set to allow MW access on the following ports:
| Port | Service |
|---|---|
| 25 | SMTP |
| 80 | HTTP/Hotmail |
| 110 | POP3 |
| 143 | IMAP |
| 465 | SMTP-SSL |
| 995 | POP3-SSL |
| 993 | IMAP-SSL |
| 4050 | FirstAlert |
If you use IMAP or secure mail check that the ports for these services are also open.
Closed ports will prevent MWP from working and will generate error messages like:
Cannot allocate socket connection has timed out and it may be caused by a firewall Connection was refused. Ensure that the Pop3 server is correct. No Such Host
Also some Firewall programs have settings to disable net access when the screen saver is active or the machine is in standby mode (a security feature). Check yours.
[edit] What does "DNS errors - Account does not exist" mean?
DNS servers are usually run by your ISP, normally they have several of them since they are critical components and most of the Internet is not easily accessible without one.
What they do is take pop.example.com and translate it to a number like 192.168.0.1 and return that number to your computer to use to access the site you are trying to visit. The Internet only deals with addresses in numeric form and people (normal ones anyway) prefer things like msn.com and cnn.com as they are easier to remember.
Slow or buggy results can come from a typo in an update, an attack on the server or just a bad net day (or three) on the ISP's network.
If you want to try the workaround open a DOS window and type:
ping stanmiller.info
That should return several tests of your connection to my server, part of the information should be the numeric address for my server. This is a sample from my system, the 209.217.36.7 is my numeric address.
ping stanmiller.info PING stanmiller.info (209.217.36.7) 64 bytes from smtp3.catalog.com (209.217.36.7)
What you need to do is replace the name of my server in the ping command with the name of your mail server and copy the resulting numeric address into the MWP "pop3 server address" on the account screen.
The one drawback is that your ISP may at some time change the numeric address of the server and you'd get the "no server" error and have to update the numeric address in MWP, not a common thing for most folks but it could happen.
[edit] Why does the preview pane launch the wrong browser?
To specify what mail program to use whenever you click on a URL, you need to get to "Folder Options" which may be in the Control Panel, or alternatively open Windows Explorer. Depending on your Windows version, click either:
Tools -> Folder Options
or
View -> Folder Options.
Click the File Types tab, then click on the File Types heading above the list to sort it (it just makes it easier). Look for an entry called URL:MailTo Protocol.
Under the default sort it would be under the Extensions: N/A and File Types: URL:MailTo Protocol.
Click Advanced, then Edit, and look under Application used to perform action.
For Outlook Express, it should be:
"C:\Program Files\Outlook Express\msimn.exe" /mailurl:%1
For Netscape, change it to (copy and paste works):
"C:\Program Files\Netscape\Netscape\Netscp.exe" -compose %1
For Thunderbird put:
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird.exe" -compose %1
[edit] Why do I get messages stuck at the mail server?
From time to time MWP will have a conflict with various anti-virus programs and the way that they react to malformed e-mail messages. If this happens please check the troubleshooting forum to see if there is a discussion about your problem. Use the forum search page and search for the name of your virus program, setting the search to use the Category: "FireTrust", return posts not topics and to return all available text will get you the best results.
If you do not find a similar problem or a fix for yours please post a message in the MailWasher - Troubleshooting / General forum giving the problem you are having, your operating system and version, virus program and version (with last update if you know it) and someone will get back to you.
[edit] What should I do if a "List index out of bounds" message is received?
NOTE: If this message is received when attempting to remove the Action column from the display seetings, the message can be ignored.
However, if it's received when MWP is (re)started, it's an indication of a more serious problem. If the latter is the case, the following procedure will correct the problem:
NOTE: This process resets MailWasher registry settings. Use it to resolve any error situation where you suspect that the MailWasher registry settings have become corrupted.
Close MailWasher Pro, then right click on your MailWasher shortcut, select properties from the pop-up menu. Add a space and -restore to the end of the target so it reads something like:
"C:\Program Files\Firetrust\MailWasher Pro\MailWasher.exe" -restore
Notes:
1. Make sure you place the double quote marks exactly where they are shown in the example.
2. Make sure you insert a space before the -restore
[edit] Shortcut modification method
Click OK
Then once you have started MailWasher Pro, go back to the shortcut you altered, and remove the -restore
[edit] Run program method
Copy the modified target to the paste buffer.
Open the "Run" command line (or "Start Search" if using Vista), paste the target, and click OK.
When you restart MailWasher, you can expect to lose your accounts, your registration key and any settings you have altered. However, your blacklist/friends List and your filters will be retained.
You will need to add your accounts back in again.
[edit] And how do I deal with a cryptic "#####" error message?
These are among the "Cryptic error message" dialogs that can pop up when running MWP. They result from a condition that the programmers did not expect to happen, but they included an error message, just in case it did.
| Cryptic Error Message | First Reported | Problem Seen in Version(s) | Possible Cause | Possible Workaround | Claimed Fix in Version |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A220.2 | 10/1/2004 | V4.1.9 (Trial) | Using Automatic Setup to set up accounts. | Set up accounts manually. Eliminate any duplicates. | (Unknown) |
| D627 | 5/26/2004 | V4.1 V4.1.7.5 (Beta?) V4.1.9 Beta | Using a large archive size (8 - 10 MB). MWP not recognizing how large the learning archive files should be. Running V4.1.7.5 on Win98SE. | Try reducing archive size to 4 MB, then restart MWP. Also try stopping MWP, deleting the training archive files, then restarting MWP. If using V4.1.7.5, try reverting back to V4.1. | V4.1.7.5 (?) |
| H237 | 4/18/2003 | V3.0 (?) V5.3 (?) | Reference is made to a message that has already been removed from the MailWasher message list. | Reduce the size of the messge log (?). Disable any automatic deletion of messages. Set all filters to perform the action On "Process Mail". | V4.0 (?) |
| H238 | 12/21/2002 | V2.0.21 Beta thru V4.1.7.5 | Same as H237? | For V2.0.21 Beta: Uninstall, delete all registry entries, then clean install the Pro version. | (Unknown) |
| J877.2 | 4/20/2004 | V4.0 V4.1 (Beta?) V4.1.7.7 V4.1.9 V4.1.10.1 Beta V5.1.1 Beta 0 | Same as H237? | (Unknown) | V4.1.0 V4.1.9 |
| P183 | None | ? | (Unknown) | (Unknown) | V4.1.7.5 |
For new "Cryptic error messages" not listed in the above table, go to the forum search page and do a search for the error number (not the whole message), setting the search to use the Category: "FireTrust", return posts, not topics, and to return all available text. This will get you the best results.
If an explanation of the cryptic error message still cannot be found, then create a MailWasherPro_debug.txt file and prepare an e-mail to send to the Mailwasher® Pro Product Support team.
If you receive any detailed explanations in return from Mailwasher® Pro Technical Support, then please add it to the above table (or post a new topic with the details in the Mailwasher Pro Troubleshooting / General Forum).
[edit] Where does MWP store my info?
MWP settings and account information are stored in the registry. There is a separate utility to back these up to a .REG file so that they can be restored at a later date or moved to another computer: MWbackup utility. Data files must be separately backed up per the below.
Your friends list and blacklist (both in blacklist.txt) as well as your filters (filters.txt) are stored in a directory that can be found by clicking on Help then About and the link near the bottom of the box. For version 5 and above your training files are in the training subdirectory there. The data directory is also the location of the debug file and the socket logs if you enable extended error logging from the help-about box.
Before changing or copying any of these files you should have MWP completely closed or the copies may be corrupted.
[edit] What are the numbers in the blacklist and friends list?
Those numbers are the date the entry last got a 'hit'. The higher the number, the more recent the date. The numbers are dates in Excel format, AKA the days since 1 Jan 1900. A zero means the address won't expire.
After MWP has found a match with one of the blacklist entries (after a mail check), it puts/updates the date number behind it, i.e. 38126. This way, MW can determine when the address will expire and has to be deleted from the blacklist. Under the List Options button, you can tell MW when to expire and remove blacklisted addresses. If you copy the number into Excel and format the cell as Date, you can see what date it represents.
For more info on the number check http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/calendar/ scroll down to "Excel Serial Day Number".
[edit] How do I get Gmail to work with MWP?
- Go to MailWasher >> Tools >> Accounts >> click [Add] button
- Set the POP3 radio button
- Click [OK].
- Type the name by which you would like to refer to this mail account
- Click the [Next >>] button.
- Enter pop.gmail.com in the POP3 server address field.
- Enter your Gmail uname including @gmail.com in the User name field.
- Enter your Gmail password in the Password field
- Click the [Advanced account options] button >> Select the Incoming Mail (POP3) tab.
- Check the box next to This server requires a secure connection (SSL). The port will change to 995.
- Click [OK] >> Click the [Next >>] button.
- Temporarily check the box next to Enable bouncing of messages from this account. The remaining fields will be enabled.
- Enter your Gmail uname including @gmail.com in the email address field.
- Enter smtp.gmail.com in the SMTP server address field.
- Click on the [Advanced account options] button >> select the Outgoing Mail (SMTP) tab
- Check the box next to This server requires a secure connection (SSL) . The port will change to 465.
- Click [OK]
- Uncheck the Enable bouncing of messages from this account. The remaining fields will be disabled however settings still apply for message restoration.
- Click [OK] >> [Close].
- Enable POP access on your Gmail account
- Follow the instructions at http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13273
[edit] How do I get Yahoo! mail to work with MWP?
[edit] Yahoo.com:
MailWasher is designed to read mail from POP server mailboxes. Standard free Yahoo! mailboxes are on a web server, and are not in POP format. You can pay for an upgrade to your Yahoo! mail by upgrading to Yahoo! Plus described at http://mailplus.mail.yahoo.com.
Alternatively, you can download and install software that will translate MailWasher's requests to access POP servers into a request to read the web server mailbox from Yahoo!.
One offering that does this is called FreePOPs. Download from http://www.freepops.org. You need to configure your account in MailWasher as POP3, the incoming server as localhost, the user as yourname@yahoo.com. Click Advanced and specify the port as 2000 instead of 110. Make sure FreePOPs is running. In MW Pro, do a Check Mail and MW Pro will read your inbox from those accounts as if they were POP3 accounts, even though they are actually on web-based mail systems.
[edit] Yahoo.co.uk:
The yahoo.co.uk help pages explain how to set up to get pop mail. What you need do is log into yahoo,go to your account or your preferences,or web mail its one of them,scroll down and put a bullet or check mark in external mail, pop 3 or outlook express or what ever mail is needed.
Here is a quick guide.
Please ensure that Pop Access is activated in the Mail Options section of your Yahoo Mail Account.
- Click the "Mail Options" link in the left-hand navigation bar of
Yahoo! Mail.
- Click the "POP Access and Forwarding" link on the Options screen.
- Click the radio button beside the Web and POP Access heading, and
then click "Submit".
[edit] How do I get Hotmail to work with MWP?
MailWasher is designed to read mail from POP server mailboxes. Standard free Hotmail mailboxes are on a web server, and are not in POP format. You can pay for an upgrade to your Hotmail mail by upgrading to Homail Plus described at http://upgrade.msn.com.
Alternatively, you can download and install software that will translate MailWasher's requests to access POP servers into a request to read the web server mailbox from Hotmail.
One offering that does this is called FreePOPs. Download from http://www.freepops.org. You need to configure your account in MailWasher as POP3, the incoming server as localhost, the user as yourname@hotmail.com. Click Advanced and specify the port as 2000 instead of 110. Make sure FreePOPs is running. In MW Pro, do a Check Mail and MW Pro will read your inbox from those accounts as if they were POP3 accounts, even though they are actually on web-based mail systems.
[edit] What is the priority sequence for spam tools?
The spam tools are prioritized in almost the same order as they are listed in the left-hand column of the Spam Tools menu:
- Virus warnings
- My friends list
- FirstAlert!
- My blacklist
- My filters
- Learning
- Origin of spam
(Note the one exception: Virus warnings has the highest priority, even though it is low in the sequence on the Spam Tools menu).
This behavior is by design. You would want your friends list to be used over the Origin of spam tool, for example (in case a friend's ISP gets temporarily blacklisted). You would also want a filter that accepts mail as 'good' to over-ride what the learning tool might think.
However, there is an important exception to this priority sequence. When you create your own filters, you have the option to move any filter to a higher priority. If your filter seeks to define an e-mail as legitimate, you can place it above the blacklist level. If your filter seeks to define an e-mail as spam, you can place it above the friends level.
Taking these exceptions into account, the full priority list for spam tools is:
- Virus warnings
- My filters that override friends list or blacklist
- My friends list
- FirstAlert!
- My blacklist
- My filters (without overrides)
- Learning
- Origin of spam
If there are conflicting actions, which takes precedence?
Since any message can fall into more than one of the above 8 categories, there may be conflicting actions. For example, a message flagged as spam by FirstAlert! may also be flagged by one of my blacklist entries, and by one of the Origin of spam servers. The action specified by different spam tools may vary -
- do not mark for deletion
- mark for deletion on process mail
- mark for deletion automatically
The action that is taken will be the one that is specified for the highest priority spam tool
Subset priorities
Within the category "My filters" you can specify several filters. These filters are applied in the sequence in which they appear. You can move filters up or down this list to suit your requirements. For any message, once MailWasher has a match on one of these filters, the remaining filters are not applied.
But wait! There is one more exception!
The folks at Firetrust are a bit conservative. Since the Origin of spam tool can be a bit harsh on what might be legitimate mail, they built in a safeguard. If the Learning tool concludes that mail looks legitimate, but the Origin of spam suggests that it came through a known spam site, then it will not auto-delete that message, even if requested in your setting for the Learning tool. It will be flagged under Status as Origin blacklisted by xxxx but the learning column will indicate that it is legitimate.
[edit] Why am I not being notified about new messages being received?
If selected by the user under Options > General, the minimized Mailwasher icon blinks to notify the user when new, legitimate email arrives.
There are several things that affect notification:
- At least some of the new mail must be new (old emails left on the server don't trigger the notification)
- At least one of the new messages must NOT be classified by any of the tools as Junk/deleted/reported, etc. (ie, one must be legitimate)
- All of the legitimate email must not be hidden
- MW must be minimized and/or obscured on the desktop (not in the foreground.}
All these conditions were set to trigger the alert because the majority of users requested that they should not be alerted unless there was something they actually wanted to look at (they didn't want to be annoyed when there was only junk.)
When you first begin to use MW, the learning tool isn't accurate enough yet - and not all of the junk is caught by it. You'll therefore get alerted a lot. As time goes on and more emails are entered into training, the tool becomes more accurate, more junk is caught, and less alerts occur.
[edit] Why are some of the downloaded messages not displaying?
FIRST SOLUTION
In MWP click on View then Show 'hidden' emails so that it is checked.
All hidden emails will now be displayed.
Note: The choice as to whether to display or hide messages resides in many places, under Tools > Spam Tools options such as
- FirstAlert!
- My filters
- Learning - Recognizing spam
- Learning - Recognizing mail
- Origin of spam
SECOND SOLUTION
If you saw that more messages were being downloaded than the number of messages dispayed, and the first solution did not reveal them, it is likely that some were automatically deleted. You can review what messages have been automatically deleted by going to Tools > Statistics > Message log
Note: The choice as to whether to automatically delete messages also resides in many places, under Tools > Spam Tools options such as
- FirstAlert!
- My blacklist
- My filters
- Learning - Recognizing spam
- Origin of spam
THIRD SOLUTION
It may be that the "missing" messages are above or below those displayed on the screen. Even if there are no scroll bars, try highlighting the topmost message and click the Page-Up or cursor up key. Also try highlighting the lowest message and click the Page-Down or cursor down key.
[edit] How do I control what mail is displayed and hidden?
There are two levels of control for hiding mail from view.
- From the menu bar, select View, and you can toggle on or off the option "Show 'hidden' emails Ctrl+F8"
- From the menu bar, select Tools, then Spam Tools. For most of the spam tools, you will find an option to hide or display the email. You can select from these to suit your own requirements.
Once you have decided to hide any email, then potentially there will be mail that is in your inbox, but not displayed. To make the hidden mail displayed, you need to use the first option to show what is hidden.
If an email is categorized by more than one spam tool (eg Learning, My filter, Origin of spam) then there may be a conflict on whether or not to hide it. MailWasher resolves this conflict according to the precedence of the spam tools, which is discussed under What is the priority sequence for spam tools?
[edit] Why do messages downloaded to my client keep showing up in MWP?
MW shows all messages on the server all the time.
Normally, email clients using POP3 will delete messages from the server after they've downloaded them - the result being that they'll be deleted from MW's display, too, but only when MW next checks the mail and finds the emails are no longer on the server (that is, they'll not be immediately removed from MW's display.) If you've set your email client to leave messages on the server, they'll still show up in MWP after download.
Email clients using IMAP will leave mail on the server all the time.
To cause emails to be removed from the MWP display on next download:
- For POP3 accounts: Set your email client to delete after download.
- For IMAP accounts: Move email you've downloaded from the INBOX to another folder.
You can (immediately) clear the MW display grid by using Email>Clear the message list (or the C hotkey.)
[edit] Why are messages sent by MWP rejected by my SMTP server?
MWP assumes that an email address is made up of uname + domain, but in some cases, the uname includes the domain too, so when MWP assembles an email address for the purposes of reporting, summary etc, it ends up with something like
user@domain.com@mail.domain.com
which some smtp servers will reject.
Also, some ISPs are now not accepting outgoing email messages if the "From" address is not within the ISP's domain (done in order to curb spam).
An easy way to force MWP to use a particular address is to enter it into the bounce option window for that account. To do this, on versions older than 5.2 you need to enable bounce, enter the address then disable bounce.
Then if MWP sees that the email address box isn't empty, it'll use that for the sending address. Otherwise it'll make one up from the information to hand.
Another issue can be your SMTP server refusing to accept a large number of spam reports in a short time or having it reject messages that look like spam to it.
Two different programs could be used (one or the other not both at once) to bypass your ISP's outgoing mail filtering that is blocking MW's sending SpamCop and BlueFrog spam reports.
First is http://www.softstack.com/freesmtp.html which is a simple and quick to install program. It offers little in the way of features but it will send your spam reports with no problems.
Second is http://www.postcastserver.com/ which is a more complicated program with many features and excellent logging. However, it is more difficult to set up and get running. It also offers support forums.
There must be other similar programs out there that work as well or better but either of these two should give satisfactory results.
[edit] I'm getting a message "Prepping Recycle Bin" for more than a couple minutes
In Mailwasher click on Help then About, Click the link there to open an Explorer window. Exit MW completely!
Delete all the files in this directory except for the Blacklist.txt, filters.txt, and the training subdirectory. This will clear out your recycle bin and you won't be able to recover messages you saved there if you had that option enabled.
[edit] MW won't import address book from OE
If you also have Outlook installed, your problem may be that if you weren't paying attention during the OE install, OE may be configured to share the OUTLOOK contacts - and won't have a Windows Address Book (WAB). The WAB is what OE normally uses and MW is designed import OE contacts from the WAB only. So: no WAB, no MW access!
The following information details how to tell if the OE WAB is disabled and how to re-enable it. With it re-enabled, you can follow the procedures in the MW FAQ (at http://www.firetrust.com/en/support/mailwasher-pro/faq/friends-list#import-contacts ) to export Outlook contacts to OE's WAB:
- If there is no path shown in the Address Book under Help | About Address Book, that means OE is sharing the Contacts folder in Outlook, and so no *.wab file is being used. Sharing allows OE to display only the Contacts folder in the default *.pst in Outlook's default Profile. You can't access other Outlook folders, just the Contacts folder, and there is no support for using Shared Contacts amongst multiple OE Identities. To turn off sharing and revert to using a *.wab, click Tools | Options (which appears only in OE5/5.5 and only if Outlook98/2000 is installed and configured in Internet Mail Only mode). However, starting with OE6 and Outlook 2002 (Outlook XP) and Outlook 2003, sharing is no longer officially supported. If you install as an upgrade and sharing is already enabled, it will remain enabled after the upgrade (or at least, it should). Therefore the Tools | Options has been removed from OE6. In that case, you can still manually enable (or disable) sharing by editing this registry key after closing Outlook Express:
| HKEY_CURRENT_USER
|----Software
|-------Microsoft
|----------WAB
|--------------WAB4
- Create a new DWORD value named UseOutlook, or modify that value if it already exists. To enable sharing, so that OE no longer uses a *.wab, set UseOutlook to 1. To disable sharing, set its value to 0. The change will be reflected the next time you open OE
Addtional information found at this link might be helpful: http://www.insideoe.com/files/wab.htm
the initial article series developed for CastleCopWiki. | ||
| Spam Tools | MWP FAQ | |
| Blacklist Management Software | MailWasher Pro Filters | |
| edit this template | ||
The series was developed as independent | ||
| Ad-Aware | ewido | ZoneAlarm |
| edit this template | ||
