Exporting Outlook Account settings

If you're using POP or IMAP in Outlook, it's found that occasionally profiles and settings go a little wonky or software hooking into Outlook won't work any more (we've found that early Blackberry Desktop software can crash when you sychronise and you need to delete and recreate your profile to fix it)

You may want to move your mail settings to a new PC, or perhaps you need to backup of your mail settings for another reason. Either way, here are various methods with which to back up your Outlook Profile settings.

Outlook 2000 - Export account settings (.iaf) within Outlook Services from the control panel, nice and easy.

Outlook 2002/2003 - There's a "Microsoft Office 2003 Save My Settings Wizard" in the "Microsoft Office Tools". That will allow you to 'save' and 'restore' all Office settings to and from a file. The only disadvantage is that the accounts can't be saved separately. It saves all of them in one file (as well as any other Office settings, I guess). So you'd want to be careful that you're not overwriting recent changes when you use a previously backed up file. Doesn't move passwords.

Microsoft Files and Settings Transfer Wizard - FASTWIZ - Imports/Exports Outlook settings along with the rest of the registry. Doesn't move passwords.

Direct Registry Manipulation - Open Regedit and go to

[HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-xxxx\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook

Edit or delete entries as required, or export them then import them to a new PC. If you use this method to move the settings to another PC, make sure you do a search and replace on the xxxxx as your GUID will be different. It's usually a good idea to back up the existing key on the new PC before deleting it. Remember to always make a registry backup first and just be careful in there!

Lastly, you can record the values manually. When doing this (or when using Save my Settings Wizard or FASTWIZ) using Snadboy Revelation to reveal the passwords will usually do the trick.