Adding/Recreating a Mail Profile

In some cases it is recommended or needed to create a new/additional mail profile. These situations could be;

• corrupt mail profile (needed)
• upgraded/downgraded to another version of Outlook (recommended and in some cases needed)
• changed mail account/ISP (recommended)
• need to connect to separate Exchange servers (needed)
• specific need to separate accounts (needed)
• testing (recommended)

To (re)create a mail profile follow the following steps;

1. go to Control Panel-> Mail-> button Show Profiles…
   If you are using a 64-bit edition of Windows;
   go to Control Panel-> Additional Options-> View 32-bit Control Panel Items-> Mail-> button Show Profiles…
2. press the button Add…
   • Do NOT use Copy… not even when you want to recreate your mail profile or you’ll end up copying the corruption as well
   • Do NOT delete your old profile, not even when it is corrupted, before you verified that the new one works. You might want to lookup some account settings afterwards
3. Enter a name for your profile
4. Select to add a new mail account
5. Make sure you choose the correct account type. Ask your ISP or administrator if you do not know this.
   If you are using Live Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo or AOL, you can find the settings you need here.
   In Outlook 2007 you can simply type your desired display name, email address and password and Outlook will try to determine and configure your account automatically. If this fails you can still choose to configure it manually with the information provided by your ISP.
6. Follow on-screen instructions to (further) configure your account. Again; Ask your ISP or administrator if you do not know these details.

An overview of configured mail profiles for Outlook.
It is configured to prompt with which profile Outlook should be started.

Now that you’ve added an additional account you should configure Outlook to prompt you for which profile you want to start Outlook with. You can do this in the same Mail applet opened in step 1 and select "Prompt for a profile to be used." If you just want to recreate your mail profile instead of adding a new one you can configure it to use your newly created profile as the default by selecting "Always use this profile" and select your new profile.

Optional but still recommended

Leave copy on server
If you are using a POP3 account and you want to leave a copy on the server, press the More Settings… button when configuring your account and select the Advanced tab to configure this option. You can find more information about this settings in this post.

Adding back your previous emails and archives
When you are done creating the mail profile you might want to add a pst-file to it like your original pst-file or an archive file. To do this open Outlook and choose;
File-> Open-> Outlook Data File…

Deliver your email to your original pst-file
If you want new e-mails delivered to another pst-file you must change the default delivery location. To do this in Outlook 2002/XP and Outlook 2003 go to;

1. Tools-> E-mail Accounts…-> button Next
2. At the bottom there is a dropdown list where you can select the name of the pst-file you want mails delivered to
3. Restart Outlook

Selecting the default delivery location of new e-mails in Outlook 2002/XP and 2003

For Outlook 2007 go to

1. File-> Data File Management…
2. Select the name of the pst-file you want mails delivered to and press the "Set as Default" button
3. Restart Outlook

Selecting the default delivery location of new e-mails in Outlook 2007

Remove empty pst-file
When you reconnected your original pst-file to Outlook and set it as the default delivery location you might want to remove the empty pst-file you created during the profile configuration. Don’t start with deleting the pst-file or you’ll end up corrupting the profile. Instead disconnect the pst-file first;

1. In Outlook choose File-> Data File Management…
2. Remember the path to the pst-file you want to remove
3. Press Remove
4. Close Outlook
5. Go to the location of the pst-file
6. Delete it

Remove old profile
Now that you’ve fully configured your new profile and verified it that it works you might want to remove the old one;

1. Go to Control Panel-> Mail-> button Show Profiles…
2. Select the profile the old profile
3. Press Remove

You’re done! You should now have a properly configured account with your original pst-file as the default delivery location.