From: Matt Pease (Rackspace customer and customer advocate sidekick!)
Twitter ID: @Dragon2611
I switched to [Rackspace Email & Apps] about a month ago. Even though I could fairly easily run my own SMTP server, I chose Rackspace since it meant I could get support if anything went wrong. Plus, I’d rather get on with what I’d rather be doing, rather than worrying about email.
Since I work across multiple computers, I always use IMAP. That way, I can still use a local email client [(e.g., Outlook, Thunderbird)] on each computer, while still keeping my email in sync. And Rackspace’s “Sync for Outlook” plugin ensures that my Calendar and Contacts get sync’d, too, without the need for expensive Exchange servers.
So, yesterday . . .
I was sitting at my home computer playing a game. I’d left Outlook running in the background to ensure that, if any email came in, I’d be alerted.
After finishing the game, I found that Outlook had crashed. After troubleshooting everything—from a simple reboot to creating a new profile—I was able to determine that the problem was, most likely, a corrupt profile. I even tried Microsoft’s PST repair tool, but Outlook still wasn’t behaving.
No worries, though. Since all of my email, calendar, and contact data is on the Rackspace server, all I needed to do was 1) create a new profile 2) set up IMAP to access my email data and 3) run the Sync for Outlook plugin (from Rackspace), using the “Recover Data” option, to download my calendar and contact data.
Thanks to IMAP and Sync for Outlook, the whole process of re-configuring Outlook took only a few minutes, whereas I could have spent hours trying to otherwise recover my locally stored mail/PST data.
