WASHINGTON, 8 January 2008 — If you use two or more computers and retrieve your Outlook e-mail on each one, you have a real problem. The e-mail you have on one machine won’t match what you have on another.
And that means that when you go looking for an important message that you know you saved, you might find it, or you might not.
Put simply, you have a problem of synchronization. For most people, e-mail is just too important these days to have to worry about which computer holds that important message. And as we become more mobile and have Internet and hence e-mail access from just about anywhere, a strategy to deal with synchronizing e-mail becomes critical.
By far the most popular e-mail program for businesses and individuals alike is Microsoft’s Outlook. So long as you’re using Outlook in a corporation, synchronization is typically not a problem.
The company will maintain what’s called an Exchange Server, which holds all e-mail, so no matter where you are in a building or company, if you have access to their e-mail server, you have access to your e-mail — already synchronized.
But if you’re on your own, the situation is different. Most folks download their e-mail into Outlook, and all those messages then reside on the computer on which the mail was retrieved. Switch to another computer with Outlook installed, and the mail program has no way of retrieving again the messages that are stored on the other machine.
Luckily, there are a couple of approaches that you can take to keeping your personal mail synchronized in Outlook when you use more than one computer.
Offline Tools
The first, less expensive method is with a synchronization tool that copies changes in Outlook back and forth between two (or more) computers. There are many such tools available, including Easy2Sync (http://www.itsth.de/en/produkte/e2s4o.php), EZOutlookSync (http://www.ezoutlooksync.com), and OutlookSync (http://www.curosoft.com/outlooksync.html). Each is available in a trial version, and before you buy one, you should try it.
To use these, you have to know, first, that Outlook stores your e-mail, contacts, and calendar entries in a file called Outlook.pst, and you also have to know how to locate that file. Doing so is pretty easy, but the location is certainly not common knowledge.
To find your PST file, open Outlook, and from the File menu, select Data File Management. From the resulting Outlook Data Files dialog box, select the Open Folder button. When you do, a folder will open, and you’ll see a file called Outlook.pst. Note the location of the file by looking at the address bar, or simply copy the file to a location of your choice. Do the same for your other copy of Outlook on another computer.
Once you have access to the two PST files that need to be synchronized, you can run the synchronization tool you’ve chosen to make the two files — including your e-mail, contacts, and calendar — identical.
It’s a good idea to use these tools in conjunction with some online storage service that will allow you to upload your PST file periodically. That way, you’ll have access to a PST file whenever you’re connected to the Internet. A free storage service such as Mozy (http://mozy.com) is perfect for this.
Synchronizing Through Internet
The trouble, of course, with traditional synchronization tools is that they require you to have on hand the two files — in this case, the Outlook.pst files — that are to be made identical. Getting these files together is not always possible, so a more realistic solution may be to turn to an Internet-based synchronization service such as OutShare (http://www.outshare.com) or Syncing.net (http://www.syncing.net/en/products/syncingnet-for-outlook/features.html).
Both services make use of a server that makes your Outlook data available for synchronization whenever you log on — from any computer. Essentially all of the heavy lifting of synchronization is done for you in the background.
So long as you are logged on to the service using the account you create at signup, your Outlook e-mail and contacts will be kept synchronized, no matter how many computers you use.
You’ll pay for this privilege, of course. OutShare charges about $5 per month for a personal plan, while Syncing.net sell for a flat fee of $58. Nevertheless, if e-mail and contact synchronization is vital to what you do, the services may easily pay for themselves very quickly in saved time and frustration.