How can I get Outlook to restore previously-open message windows when restarting?

So Outlook crashed on me yesterday...

...Ok, so that's not terribly interesting. But what happened next was: there was a "Restart" option on the resulting crash dialog. When I clicked it, Outlook re-opened along with all of my previously-open messages!

Well, surprise, surprise - Outlook missed an opportunity to annoy me!

But now I'm curious: is there a way to make this happen intentionally? I do enjoy closing Outlook now and then, to reboot or just to get it out of my hair. But losing track of the messages I'd been reading isn't much fun. I suppose I could flag them or something, but that's tedious - I'd rather just close the app on a whim, knowing I could pick back up where I left off later.

So: is there an option for this somewhere, buried deep within the bowels of Outlook's labyrinthine Options dialog? Or failing that... Any good tips on making Outlook crash on demand?

4

4 Answers

1) make a shortcut to the Outlook application on your desktop (you may already have one there)

2) right-click the shortcut and choose the last menu item "Properties"

3) in the field labeled "Target" you should see a file path to where Outlook is installed on your PC. Click to the end of that path and add /restore

It should look something like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\OUTLOOK.EXE" /restore

Now when you launch Outlook via that shortcut it will restore all open items. Really useful if your machine crashes or Windows force restarts based on a critical update.

3

Perhaps use the /restore switch on the command line:

2

There is a new Outlook setting that does this, under General->Start up options: "When Outlook opens" - available options are:

• Ask me if I want to restore previous items (default)
• Never restore previous items (old behavior)
• Always restore previous items (what you want)

I was looking for it and stumbled across this post. The link is here:

1

You can attempt to hibernate the process to disk.

If it works, you get your messages. If it doesn't work and crashes, you get your messages back.

Unless it completely doesn't work, this should be a win-win situation... :)

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