Email and Microsoft 365
You cannot open a saved .msg email file
Someone sends you an email with an attachment that ends in .msg, or you go back to one you filed away on the shared drive, and it will not open. Sometimes nothing happens at all. Sometimes Windows asks which program to use. Sometimes you get an error ...
Microsoft Office on a Mac keeps asking you to sign in
Word, Excel or Outlook on a Mac asks you to sign in, you type your password, it accepts it, and ten minutes later it asks again. Sometimes the box will not accept the password at all. This is one of the most common Mac problems we see and it is ...
Microsoft Teams: meetings, recordings and call quality basics
Teams handles your meetings, calls and internal chat. Most of it is straightforward once you know where things live. This covers setting up a meeting, inviting people outside your business, finding a recording afterwards, and what to do when a call ...
Out of office, forwarding, and covering someone on leave
Someone is going on leave and their mail needs to be handled. There are three separate jobs here, and doing the right one saves a lot of trouble. An automatic reply tells senders you are away. Forwarding sends mail somewhere else. Cover means a ...
Sending large files without clogging up email
You try to send a set of photos, a video, or a big drawing, and the message either bounces, sits in the Outbox forever, or arrives with the attachment stripped out. Email was never built to move large files. Sending a link instead takes about the ...
Recovering a deleted email, or a whole mailbox
You have deleted something you needed. Most of the time you can get it back yourself, and there is a second hidden safety net after Deleted Items that very few people know about. Act sooner rather than later, because every one of these options runs ...
Microsoft 365 says your subscription has expired or the product is deactivated
A red or yellow banner appears across the top of Word, Excel or Outlook saying your subscription has expired, or that the product is deactivated. Editing stops and documents go read-only. It looks alarming, but your files and your email are ...
Outlook is slow, freezing, or stuck loading your profile
Outlook takes a minute to open, goes grey and says Not Responding when you click a message, or hangs on the Loading Profile screen and never gets past it. This is usually the local copy of your mailbox struggling rather than a problem with your email ...
Setting up work email on a new phone
New phone, and you want your work email on it. This takes about ten minutes. The part that trips people up is not the email setup, it is the security check that proves the phone is yours, particularly if the old phone has already been wiped or handed ...
Sharing a mailbox or a calendar with someone else
Two different things get called sharing, and picking the wrong one causes most of the confusion. Sharing your own calendar or a folder from your own mailbox is something you can do yourself in a minute. A proper shared mailbox, such as accounts@ or ...
Emails to one particular company keep bouncing
Your mail sends normally all day, then every message to one particular company comes straight back as undeliverable. Annoying, and usually fixable. The first thing to work out is how wide the problem is, because that decides whose end it is on. Try ...
Emails are landing in Deleted Items or vanishing from the inbox
Someone tells you they sent an email, and it is not in your inbox. You find it in Deleted Items, or in a folder you have never used, or not at all. Mail almost never disappears on its own. Something moved it, and there are only a handful of things ...
Outlook will not send or receive: work through this first
Mail stops arriving, or a message sits in the Outbox and will not budge. Nine times out of ten this is Outlook losing its connection to the mail server rather than anything wrong with your account or your message. The checks below are safe and take ...