Users who use Outlook with IMAP to access their Gmail account (whether regular Gmail or Google Apps Gmail) will have problems when they attempt to archive their Emails using Outlook AutoArchive or manually initiating an Outlook archiving process.

There are 2 issues that prevent archiving from being successful with Outlook:

• Gmail Related Problem: Gmail manages Emails in a different way than what usually Email Servers/Services do.
  • Gmail uses labels instead of folders. Multiple labels can be assigned to the same Email; and when you get a new Email it will automatically have 2 labels: Inbox and “All Mail”.
  • Gmail uses the “All Mail” label as the place where you should be archiving your Emails. This means, you will never have to delete any Email and you will always be able to access old Emails.
• Outlook Related Problem: Outlook has an odd method for archiving Emails; it makes use of the most recent date of Sent, Received, and Modified dates of an Email. There are various reasons on why the Modified date of an Email would get updated and it is most apparent when you have an IMAP account; as soon as you connect to the IMAP server and have Emails synchronized, the Modified date will be set to the Current date! This makes the archiving process virtually only relying on the Modified date. An attempt to archive Emails using Outlook may result in archiving nothing! More about this is available at the Microsoft article (do NOT follow their lame workaround).

In this tutorial, we will tackle these issues by

1. Modifying the Gmail Settings to change its behavior with Outlook and IMAP.
2. Using third-party software, called MailStore, to archive your Emails depending on the Sent and Received dates of your Emails.

(Outlook 2007 is used in this tutorial)

Important:

After changing the Gmail IMAP settings as you will see in the next section, the “All Mail” folder will no longer show in Outlook. If you have Emails that only have “All Mail” label, you will no longer see them in Outlook and, in this case, if you wanted to archive them or deal with them locally, you will have to assign these emails another label such as Inbox or any label you want. You may do that using the Gmail webmail interface or Using Outlook before applying the new settings.

Changing the Gmail IMAP settings,

1. Login to your Gmail Webmail account.
2. On the top-right of the page, click on the Settings link.
3. Select the Labs tab.
4. Look for “Advanced IMAP Controls” section then click on the Enable radio button.
5. Scroll back to top and click on the “Save Changes” button.
6. Again, click on the Settings link and then on the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab.
7. In the “IMAP Access” section, you will see new options that can be set. If you haven’t enabled the IMAP feature before, you should do so now by clicking on the “Enable IMAP” radio button.
8. Under the “Auto-Expunge” section, click “Do not automatically expunge messages” radio button.
9. Under the “When a message is expunged from the last visible IMAP folder” section, click the “Move the message to the Trash” radio button.
   Note: you can set the option to delete messages permanently, but this will not let you restore accidently deleted messages. If you just set them to be moved to Trash (as we have done above), the emails will be deleted automatically after 30 days (or you can later access the Trash label/folder and delete them from there).
10. Click the “Save Changes” button.
11. Click on the Settings link and then on the Labels tab.
12. For “All Mail”, uncheck the “Show in IMAP” checkbox. (This setting will be applied immediately).
    Note: there is no need to click the hide link; it is just for the webmail and will not affect the labels visibility in Outlook.

Archiving your Emails,

There are two ways you can use to archive your Emails, either manually moving your items in Outlook or using third-party software to archive your Emails easily and conveniently. Choose the way that best suits your needs.

So you can:

• Manually archive your Emails: By moving Emails to “Personal Folders” and then use AutoArchive on Personal Folders at a later time or move them directly to .pst files.
• Or Using MailStore: that will allow you to easily and efficiently archive your Emails.

Before you attempt to archive your Emails, it is important to understand how Outlook and Gmail behave with the changed Gmail settings.

Deleting an Email in Outlook,

When you delete an Email in your Outlook IMAP account, the Email will not be deleted directly and instead, it will be marked for deletion by Outlook. When an Email is marked for deletion, you will see a strikethrough on the header of the Email. To complete the deletion process you will need to purge them and to do that: click the Edit item in the Menu bar, then point to Purge, then select

• Purge Marked Items in “folder”, where “folder” is the folder containing your marked Email for deletion.
• Purge Marked Items in “Account Name”, where “Account Name” is your IMAP account.
• Purge Marked Items in “All Accounts”.

Adding the Purge Command to a toolbar,

For your convenience, you can add the Purge command to a toolbar. To add it:

1. Select Tools from the Menu bar, then click Customize.
2. Select the Commands tab.
3. Under Categories, select Edit.
4. Under Commands section, look for the Purge Command and drag it to a toolbar. Example: I have put it next to the delete button as shown in the figure below,

   

Moving an Email in Outlook IMAP,

You should understand what happens when you move an Email from an IMAP folder to some other Folder. When you do so,

• The Email will be copied to the destination folder.
• The original Email in the source folder will be marked for deletion. And therefore, you will have to purge it to complete the move process.

Automatically purging deleted Emails,

This feature is very helpful for that if you wanted Emails that are marked for deletion to be deleted automatically. To turn it on,

1. Select any folder of your IMAP account.
2. In the Menu bar, select Edit.
3. Point to Purge, and then click “Purge Options”.
4. Check the “Purge items when switching folders while online” checkbox.
5. Click the Ok button.

If that is set, you don’t have to worry anymore about purging Emails.

Note: When Emails marked for deletion are purged, they will be moved to the Trash Folder/Label (depending on our new Gmail settings). When an Email is moved to Trash, they will no longer have the “All Mail” label (achieving our goal for deleting an Email).

Note about Starred/Flagged Emails,

When using Outlook, the best way to delete a flagged Email, is to remove the flag first and then delete it. That is because we want to keep using the Gmail Starred label. If you delete and purge an Email in the Inbox folder where this Email is flagged, it will not be moved to Trash, and you will still see it in the Starred label/folder.

Now that you understand all this interaction for the new settings, it is time to setup the Outlook and MailStore for archiving your Emails.

For a better and more efficient use of the archiving method, please do the following in Outlook if you haven’t done so yet:

• Disable Outlook Junk Email filter. You will only need to use the [Gmail]/Spam folder and so the Outlook junk filter should be disabled. To do so,
  1. From the Menu bar, choose Tools then click Options.
  2. Select the Preferences tab.
  3. Click the Junk-Email button.
  4. Select “No Automatic Filtering…”
  5. Click OK, and then click OK again.
• Add the Purge Command (see “Adding the Purge Command to a toolbar” section in this tutorial)

Setting up MailStore for archiving Outlook Emails,

Downloading MailStore,

1. Open the MailStore page.
2. Then Click “Download MailStore Home” button, or just use the direct download link.

MailStore 4.0.6 Installation, (by the time of this writing, version 4.0.6 was the latest)

After you have downloaded the software, run the installer and Install the program…

When you run the program for the first time, it will ask you “Where should MailStore store all e-mail and settings?” just click “Create a new e-mail archive” radio button and click Ok button.

To run an archiving process,

1. Select the Entry of it.
2. Click the Run button at the bottom right of the Window. (Or you can simply double-click the entry).

To change the settings for an entry,

1. Select the Entry.
2. Click the Properties button at the bottom right of the window and change your settings.

You can also create a shortcut for the entry on your desktop,

1. Select the Entry.
2. Click the “Create Shortcut on Desktop” button at the bottom-right of the window. If you double-click on the shortcut, archiving will start immediately.

Note: When the archiving process finishes, the emails in your Outlook IMAP account corresponding to the archived Emails will be marked for deletion (depending on our settings). And therefore, to complete the Archiving process, you will have to purge them using the Outlook Purge command. When the Emails are purged they will be moved to the Trash label, and will be permanently deleted after 30 days.

Exporting the MailStore archive to Outlook,

After the archiving process is done, you may need to export your archive to Outlook. To do so,

1. At the left pane of the MailStore screen, you can see the “My Archive” folder tree. If you want to export the entire folder, right click over it.
2. Point to “Export To” then select “Microsoft Outlook”.
3. Choose “Export Email to your local Outlook” radio button. (The option for exporting directly to pst files is not available with the free version). Then you can use the Outlook AutoArchive on personal folders only! (Or manually move them to .pst files).

How was your experience with Outlook and Gmail? Don’t hesitate to share it with us by leaving a comment!

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Do you have a .docx Word file that you want to convert to .doc Word file but do not have Microsoft Word 2007 or earlier versions? You can convert it using Microsoft free programs, Word Viewer 2003 and Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack.

First, download and install the required programs:

1. Download Word Viewer 2003
2. Install it.
3. Download Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats
4. Install it.

Converting the .docx Word file to .doc Word file:

1. Double click the .docx file, it will be converted automatically and opened for you to view it. But at this point you didn’t really get the .doc file that you want; there is no option for you to save what you are viewing.
2. The .doc file has been actually created but it was put in the Temp folder. To see the location of the file, from the menu bar choose File, then select Properties.
   

   Word file menu

   Note that the file name of the .doc Word file being viewed is Wd0000000. You might have it as Wd0000001 , Wd0000002, or similar.

3. Click the General tab.
4. Next to the Location field, select the path as shown in the image below.
   

   Word file location

5. With the text being selected, copy it by holding the Ctrl key then pressing C key (Ctrl+C). An example of the copied file location is: C:\DOCUME~1\UserName\LOCALS~1\Temp , where UserName is the folder that holds the user account files (usually it is the same as your user account name).
6. After that, click the Windows Start button, then click Run.
7. In the Run dialog and next to the Open field, paste the copied path (using Ctrl+v).
   

   Run dialog with Temp folder path

8. Click OK button.
   Alternatively,  instead of using the Run dialog to reach the Temp folder, you can Navigate to the Temp folder step by step by going to (You should have Show Hidden Files and Folders enabled so that you can see the Local Settings folder):
   C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Temp
   It means that you go to My Computer, then drive C , then Documents and Settings , then UserName, then Local Settings , then Temp folder.
   Alternatively also, you can copy the path to the Address field after entering My Computer, then hitting Enter key or clicking Go button.
9. Now that you entered the Temp folder, look for the Word file in the folder, in our case it is called Wd0000000.doc (you might see it as Wd0000000 , it depends if you have enabled hiding the extension of known file types, i have it disabled).
   

   Converted Word doc file in Temp folder

10. Copy the file to your desktop or wherever you want.
11. You now have the .doc version of your file. However, the file has read-only attribute set, to clear this:
    1. Right click over the file and select Properties.
    2. With the General tab selected, look in the Attributes section and uncheck the Read-only checkbox.
    3. Click OK.
       

       Properties of the Word doc file

12. Finally, you just rename the file to an appropriate name that you would like.

There are other ways to convert the Word .docx file to .doc, but I just found that it is most appropriate to do it using Microsoft programs. And in case you don’t have Microsoft Office Word 2007 or 2003 you can download their free programs (Word Viewer 2003 and the Compatibility pack) to do the file conversion.

What have you used to convert .docx Word file to .doc when you didn’t have a Microsoft Word full version? let us know by commenting!

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MUST re_cover! virus showing text in AutoCAD drawing

Have you seen MUST re_cover! text showing up when you open your AutoCAD drawing? This is not an error message produced by AutoCAD or Windows, it is a text produced by a variant of acad.vlx virus that appears as a drawing. Trying to recover your file with AutoCAD recover command will not help. Your file might appear as if totally corrupted but it is not. It looks like the virus creators were not that bad when they made it, because they have given you a hint on what to do to recover your file. As you may have already noticed, the hint is MUST re_cover! .

What we are going to do is that we will use the virus itself to TRY to recover the malformed AutoCAD dwg file. When I say “to try” it means that our attempt to recover the file may or may not work depending on several facts:

1. We cannot fully trust the virus (but do we have other options?).
2. The virus may not be the same that everyone has faced, although showing the same text.
3. As we will see later in this article, the virus creators may have missed something about dwg files that it will not work on some of them correctly and so recovering the file may produce a deformed useless drawing.

Important: The following is intended to help you recover your AutoCAD dwg drawings that have been corrupted by MUST re_cover! virus. However, I GIVE YOU NO GUARANTEE WHATSOEVER THAT THIS WOULD WORK ON YOUR COMPUTER OR WOULD RECOVER YOUR FILES, DO IT AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Precautions: To avoid any or further loss of data,

1. If your AutoCAD is infected with the virus, symptom: each time you open a file it is transformed and show MUST re_cover! text, then you need to STOP OPENING AUTOCAD FILES ESPECIALLY THE ONES WHICH ARE STILL CLEAN… and continue reading my article.
2. If you have a file that is showing MUST re_cover! text, do not make any changes to it, because this might cause the recovery process to fail.
3. YOU SHOULD BACKUP YOUR FILES INCLUDING THE ACAD.VLX VIRUS FILE BEFORE ATTEMPTING TO RECOVER YOUR CORRUPTED FILES.
4. Do not clean your computer from the virus before you USE THE VIRUS ITSELF TO RECOVER YOUR FILES.
5. You may want to try doing the recovery on a test computer that you are not using in a production environment or even your personal use. Other than installing the required software on the test computer, you need ACAD.VLX virus file and your corrupted AutoCAD dwg files.

Note: If your AutoCAD is not infected and you have a file that shows the text of the virus, maybe you brought your file from a flash memory, then you have to bring also the acad.vlx file (possibly present in your flash memory) so that you can proceed and attempt recovery.

Note: If you desperately need to open an AutoCAD file right now and your AutoCAD is infected with the virus, then do the following with caution and make sure you make a copy of the file before doing it: Open the AutoCAD application alone (see images below) and then choose File, Open and browse to your file. The virus will not be loaded in this case even if acad.vlx is present in the same directory; and your file would not be transformed.

AutoCAD program shortcut

Opening an AutoCAD file using the Menu bar

How does this virus transform your file to an unusable form?

The MUST re_cover! virus is started when you double click on an AutoCAD dwg file present with acad.vlx virus file in the same folder. acad.vlx will be loaded automatically and will transform your dwg file into unusable (apparently corrupted) file. It will show transformation percentage like the one in the figure below.

MUST re_cover! virus corrupting an AutoCAD dwg file

After that, it will save the file and you will have no .bak file for it to recover from, because it will delete the .bak file. And you will see “MUST re_cover!” text.

If this has happened once on a computer, then the virus has infected the AutoCAD environment. Let us just call or describe it as AutoCAD infected.

So, what should we do?

As the virus is asking us to do, we are not going to recover the file; instead we are going to re_cover the file. (Yes, it is different )

The following was done using AutoCAD 2007. I will show you 4 different ways to try recovering your files. You can choose any one and start applying, or look for the one that matches your case right now.

Case 1: AutoCAD already infected. This is the case where the virus has run at least once on your computer.

• If the AutoCAD Program is open, then do the following:
  1. If your corrupted file is not open, open it using File,Open from the menu then browse to it.
  2. Load the acad.vlx file: type appload in the command line, then browse to the acad.vlx file (usually, you will find it in the same directory of your corrupted dwg file).
  3. type re_cover in the command line and press Enter. You will see the percentage of the recovery process, wait until it finishes.
• If the AutoCAD Program is not open then do the following:
  1. Double click on the file you want to recover and wait until it loads.
  2. Then type re_cover in the command line and press Enter. You will see the percentage of the recovery process, wait until it finishes.

Case 2: AutoCAD is not infected. This is the case where your file got infected from another computer and you didn’t run your file while acad.vlx hanging around it in the same folder. This also can be the case where you have chosen to recover your file on a test computer. Caution: The following will infect your AutoCAD, this is what we want so that you can recover your files. But I recommend you do it on a test computer.

• If the AutoCAD Program is open then do the following:
  1. If your corrupted file is not open, open it using File,Open from the menu then browse to it.
  2. Load the acad.vlx file: type appload in the command line, then browse to the acad.vlx file (usually, you will find it in the same directory of your corrupted dwg file).
  3. type re_cover in the command line and press Enter. You will see the percentage of the recovery process, wait until it finishes.
• If the AutoCAD Program is not open then do the following:
  1. Double click on the file you want to recover and wait until it loads. (Or use File, Open from the Menu).
  2. Load the acad.vlx file: type appload in the command line, then browse to the acad.vlx file (usually, you will find it in the same directory of your corrupted dwg file).
  3. type re_cover in the command line and press Enter. You will see the percentage of the recovery process, wait until it finishes.

The following image shows the recovery process.

MUST re_cover! recovering an AutoCAD drawing

Note: It really makes no difference which method of the above 4 you have chosen unless you want to do it on a test computer. I just wanted to make it clear for you to know what you should do in a certain case.

If one of the above ways succeed in running the recovery process (seeing the percentage of recovery…), observe what shows up after it finishes. 2 possible results:

• Recovery was successful: this is the case where you indeed see your drawing is back! Congratulations! You can now save it.
• Recovery was unsuccessful: this is the case where you see deformed drawings. This happens because the original file had proxy graphics that AutoCAD warned about its inability to allow editing of them, the file was transformed by the virus to show MUST re_cover! hint, but their recovery process was unsuccessful. Unfortunately, I don’t know any way around this, and there may be no way around it. The virus creators have probably missed something about it. And unfortunately again, we can’t contact the virus support.

Important: if the recovery was not successful then DO NOT SAVE, you might be able to find another solution to recover your file.

Note: A file that has been recovered using the re_cover command of the virus will NOT return back to its identical form although the virus has recovered your drawings. It will add some proxy graphics object that the virus creators seem to be using to identify that this file has been transformed and recovered and in this case the virus will not transform it again even if AutoCAD was still infected or acad.vlx is in the same directory of your dwg file. This recovered dwg file can be loaded by double clicking on it without the need to go through the Must re_cover! process again (may or may not work this way depending on the virus variant).

Do the same recovery process for every AutoCAD dwg file you need to recover. And when you have no more files to recover, proceed with the following instructions to clean your AutoCAD and computer from the virus.

Cleaning your AutoCAD and computer from the virus:

1. Now that you have recovered your files, it is time to clean up your computer from the virus. Click here to view the Autodesk article Acad.vlx Virus Cleanup. After you do it, anytime you double click on an AutoCAD file and the program launches , it will delete the acad.vlx from the same directory, and will cleanup AutoCAD from the virus.
2. You can also delete all acad.vlx files that have been created. Make a search for it and delete them all.

Now, this is very important: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO USE THIS VIRUS FOR FUN

Do not try to scare your friends or anybody by injecting the acad.vlx file into their work directory and then have their files transformed. Frankly, it is not funny at all, and you may not be able to recover their files, because as I said before:

1. You cannot trust the virus, and you don’t know which variant you have.
2. The recovery process may or may not succeed.
3. Even with successful recovery, the file is not exactly identical to the original one (as I explained before).

Have you faced this problem before? Were you able to recover your files? Did this article help you? You’re welcome to share your thoughts and comments!

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