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One of the government agencies that I provide data to hasn't received anything since the 4th of this month. (Aside: WTF - and you just noticed that now?)
Fortunately I also send the data to a shared mailbox here as well for just such occasions. Unfortunately the ancient mail exporter I am forced to use on our mainframe sends out the messages in 50K chunks, so these reports often get broken into as many as 16 parts when they go out.
No problem, it's easy enough to recombine them and... ack! Outlook's not storing them in order (unless you can find order in chaos)! No problem, they are numbered by the mainframe when they're broken apart (Part 001, Part 002, etc). I'll just sort descending by date and ascending by subject line and... ack!
The date sort was working, but the subject line sort was not. On the other hand, if I removed the date sort then the subject line sort worked just fine. I got smart at that point and thought, "I'll just group this stuff by received date and then simply sort on the subject line..." No dice: it was breaking them into tiny groups split down to the individual minutes and (presumably) seconds. Lots of tiny little groups of messages that did me no good. "Well, there's parts 13, 15 and 16. Ah, and the next group has parts 10, 14, 11 and 12..."
Of course I could have taken care of this task easily with a short VBA program, but they have thoughtfully locked out all of those features to make our jobs easier. I finally found a work-around wherein I dumped the Received date in favour of the Sent date (based on the theory that the messages were all sent at the same time regardless of when they arrived). I grouped the messages by the Sent date and sorted them by subject line. Case closed. Now all I had to do was forward the messages in the proper order and... ack! What do you mean I have to free up space before I can send mail from this account?!
The better part of my afternoon has been spent archiving messages off to one of the network shares. It's times like this when you really come to appreciate the slowness of your company's network.
Fortunately I also send the data to a shared mailbox here as well for just such occasions. Unfortunately the ancient mail exporter I am forced to use on our mainframe sends out the messages in 50K chunks, so these reports often get broken into as many as 16 parts when they go out.
No problem, it's easy enough to recombine them and... ack! Outlook's not storing them in order (unless you can find order in chaos)! No problem, they are numbered by the mainframe when they're broken apart (Part 001, Part 002, etc). I'll just sort descending by date and ascending by subject line and... ack!
The date sort was working, but the subject line sort was not. On the other hand, if I removed the date sort then the subject line sort worked just fine. I got smart at that point and thought, "I'll just group this stuff by received date and then simply sort on the subject line..." No dice: it was breaking them into tiny groups split down to the individual minutes and (presumably) seconds. Lots of tiny little groups of messages that did me no good. "Well, there's parts 13, 15 and 16. Ah, and the next group has parts 10, 14, 11 and 12..."
Of course I could have taken care of this task easily with a short VBA program, but they have thoughtfully locked out all of those features to make our jobs easier. I finally found a work-around wherein I dumped the Received date in favour of the Sent date (based on the theory that the messages were all sent at the same time regardless of when they arrived). I grouped the messages by the Sent date and sorted them by subject line. Case closed. Now all I had to do was forward the messages in the proper order and... ack! What do you mean I have to free up space before I can send mail from this account?!
The better part of my afternoon has been spent archiving messages off to one of the network shares. It's times like this when you really come to appreciate the slowness of your company's network.
