Outlook Express has the capability to define and use multiple email accounts and email servers. While this is quite helpful, there is no mechanism in Outlook Express to facilitate changing these account settings depending on your network settings. While NetSwitcher does have the ability to modify your Windows networking settings, the settings for email servers are application specific and therefore each individual email client program must be supported. While we are working on adding support for the most popular email clients into NetSwitcher, many users have asked for assistance in this.
This FAQ describes a method of switching the default mail account in Outlook Express V5.0 using the NetSwitcher RunCommand feature. This method may be useful with other Outlook Express versions but no attempt to verify the accuracy of this with other versions has been made. Note that this method does not change the actual settings for a Outlook Express mail account, it merely changes which one of these is the default for use within Outlook Express.
Step 1: First, you must define at least two Outlook Express email accounts that can be switched between. To access the Outlook Express email account manager, start Outlook Express and choose the following item from the menu:
Once you have picked the menu item, Outlook Express will display the Internet Accounts dialog box. Choose the Mail tab and you will see the accounts which are configured. Note in the picture below that we are currently configured for Hotmail as default and WR Email Server is also defined but not the default. Your display will certainly differ from this example only display:
It is beyond the scope of this document to describe how to configure your email account using the Outlook Express Internet Account manager dialog. If you have questions on how to do this or what parameters to put in the different fields, please contact your system administrator and/or internet service provider support desk.
Step 2: It is now necessary to run the Windows REGEDIT program. Do this by clicking on the Start button and then choosing Run. You will get the Run dialog and you should type in regedit:
Now you will see the REGEDIT user interface:
At this point you should navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Account Manager
in the left-hand pane of the REGEDIT user interface as shown below:
At this point, make a note of the value "Default Mail Account". In this example, it is set to a value of "00000001". This corresponds to the email account under the "Account" key which is named also, "00000001". Please make a note of which of the other keys under the "Accounts" key are related to which email account you have setup. In this example, 00000001 is my Hotmail account while 0000002 is my "WR Email Server" account.
Step 3: Now we are going to use the REGEDIT export facility to make a .reg script that can be used to modify the mail server from one default to another. First, be sure that "Internet Account Manager" is selected as shown above and then in the File menu in REGEDIT, choose the EXPORT item:
This will open the "Export Registry File" dialog box. Navigate to a convenient folder and give this a file name that you will remember. If you are running Windows 2000 be sure to select the "Save as type" box to be REGEDIT4. If you don't do this, you will not be able to complete the rest of these instructions:
Step 4: Once you've saved it, navigate to the folder where you saved this file and copy it to another file named OE_TEMPLATE.reg. Open this file in your favorite text editor and exit out all the lines except for those shown below:
Note that there MUST be a blank line after the "Default Mail Account" line. If you are brave, you can also just create this file by hand rather than doing the REGEDIT / EXPORT path. It's up to you. Just be sure you type this in EXACTLY as it should be otherwise you may overwrite something vital in your registry. Also note that if you use NOTEPAD to edit this file, it will try to give it a .txt extension. This is not what you want. This file must have a .reg extension.
You now have a "template" file for use in changing Outlook Express setups. Let's try it out...
Step 5: We now want two different copies of this template file made, we'll be calling them Hotmail.reg and WR.reg and they will look like this:
While yours will be slightly different, please make a note of and follow the pattern. It's now possible to test these files using REGEDIT. If you've named them with the required .reg file extension, you should be able to double-click on either one in the Windows Explorer and have it automatically entered into your registry. If I do WR.reg, I get:
Click "Yes" and you should get:
In my case, this should have changed the default mail account in Outlook Express. So let's check it:
Hey, it worked! Two things to note:
a) If you don't get the "Are you sure..." or "Information in..." dialogs, you probably have an error in your reg file or it's not named with a .reg extension. Fix this.
b) If Outlook Express is running when you run this, you will need to exit it and restart it before the new settings will be noted. Outlook Express only checks these settings when it starts.
Before going on, check all of your .reg files to make sure they are making the desired changes. If they don't work "standalone" here, then they won't work when NetSwitcher runs them.
Step 6: Now we are ready to configure NetSwitcher to make use of these reg files. Fire up NetSwitcher and choose the Extensions tab. First, we need to determine the correct command line switches for the REGEDIT program. It's not easy to determine these since it won't give you that information in WIN32 mode and there is no mention of it in the HELP file. The good news is that there is a KB article at:
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q82/8/21.ASP
that give us this information. Just in case they move this article as so often happens, the key information is:
REGEDIT [/v|-v] [/s|-s] <FILENAME>
So the command for NetSwitcher to use might be:
C:\WINDOWS\REGEDIT /S C:\EMAILREG\HOTMAIL.REG
Note that you want to specify the complete pathnames to both the REGEDIT program (which MIGHT NOT be in C:\WINDOWS on your system) as well as to the REG file. If you have used long file names, you'll want to use the Windows short-file path to the file.
On the Extensions tab, click the Add button in the RunCommands section and make your Command to run dialog look similar to this.
Click OK on this dialog and then SAVE this setup using the SAVE button.
Step 7: Now make similar commands for your other .reg files and save them in their respective setups. Now when you pick a setup that contains one of these, you will see:
In the Extensions tab. The other one that I setup has:
Step 8: That's all there is to it..... Test the setups out to make sure you have everything correct and then.... Enjoy!