Question: Microsoft Outlook references suddenly wrong

[R Ko]

Dear Dan,

first of all: Thanks for your great work!!

Suddenly a big problem (in combination with Microsoft Outlook 2010, 64bit) arose, which is not really surprising, but it needs a solution: 

I use the import of Outlook-Mails into TodoList extensively since 3 years, mostly successful (depending on the ToDoList-version there are differences).

Problably the reason for my problem:

With the new year 2019 I changed my Outlook.pst-files to archive them (Mails in Outlook.pst from year 2018 into a new datafile, eg. 2018.pst).

Already mentioned: In year 2018 I imported many mails into a ToDolist-File.

Problem:

After that moving from the mails inside Outlook into new .pst-files it's not possible anymore to open the mails from ToDoList. Outlook just shows now an informationless error-message like "error while operation".

Questions:

1. Do you have any suggestion, how I can change the references from TodoList to the actual references of the new .pst in Outlook? A new import from the mails would be the worst case, because I tagged and commented them all after import.

2. Is there any possibilty to merge two ToDoList-files? Then it could be easier (with help of ToDoList-xml-file an PHP eg)

Best wishes and thanks for your reply!

RK

[.dan.g.]

Hi RK

Some things I discovered when I investigated this:

1. Outlook changes the unique ID (GUID) of the messages when it archives them. ie, the archive message is wholly different from the original message

2. Outlook must have the archive pst loaded for any links to possibly work

3. Having loaded the archive pst, the 'path' to each archive message is now different from the original

The consequences of these are:

1. Any links to messages using the GUID method will probably never work again because copying or moving the archived message back to its original location gives it a new GUID.

2. Links to messages using the default 'path' method will work again if the archived messages are copied or moved back to the original location.

3. If your links were in the 'File Link' field and you used the default 'path' method then it should be possible to do a find/replace (maybe even just in a text editor) to update the links to the new 'path'

4. If your links were in the 'Comments' field and you use 'Simple Text' comments then a simple find/replace may also work

5. If your links were in 'Rich Text' comments then it's much more difficult because these comments are compressed and base64 encoded.