How to save open emails when exiting Outlook 2007

Question

I use open emails as my to-do list in Outlook 2007. For instance, when I look at my Inbox in the morning, I open all emails which I need to respond to, and throughout the day read, respond to and close each one. It's an odd system, but it's how I manage my emails.

Are there any add-ons available which will save open emails and reopen them if Outlook is restarted? I'm looking for behavior like Firefox's tabs, which will reopen each one if the process gets killed.

Answer 1

Here's how to restore your last Outlook session (requires Outlook 2010 or newer):

It looks like a lot of steps, but it's actually really simple.
You'll create a shortcut ICON for Outlook 2010, and you'll add the following, excluding the quotes: " /restore" to the end of the Shortcut Target.

1. Click on the Windows START button
2. Type into the search bar, "Microsoft Outlook 2010"
3. Right-click the Microsoft Outlook 2010 file that it found
4. Left-click "Send to"
5. Left-click "Desktop (create shortcut)"
6. Right-click the ICON on your desktop, "OUTLOOK.EXE - Shortcut"
7. Left-click the TAB called, "Shortcut" and see the text resembling: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\OUTLOOK.EXE"
8. Add a SPACE after "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\OUTLOOK.EXE" and then type /restore
9. It should now contain a value resembling: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\OUTLOOK.EXE" /restore
10. Left-click OK
11. Now you can Left-click this ICON whenever you want to start Outlook using the last session's open items.

For detailed instructions with screenshots, see here:
http://www.squidoo.com/restore-last-microsoft-outlook-email-session

Answer 2

Brute Force method:

1.Force Outlook to shut down abnormally:

C:\>taskkill /F /IM OUTLOOK.EXE

(might be a good idea to save any draft emails first)

2.Restart outlook using the /restore flag, as suggested by the other posters

But this only works sometimes, not sure why.

Answer 3

As a quick follow up to the original answer, the /restore actually does not bring messages back up if Outlook was closed normally. This only works if Outlook closed unexpectedly (crashed).

For the functionality that you are looking for, I would suggest trying out Thunderbird, the e-mail client made by Mozilla (makers of Firefox):

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/

To add calendar to Thunderbird, also download the Lightning add-on:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/lightning/

Trent