When Outlook Won't Share Nicely

Dangers may lurk in Outlook 2000's Net Folders feature.

Mark Gibbs, Network World

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Like its predecessor, Outlook 2000 is excellent in concept but could do with some serious polishing. One of the more obviously underpolished bits is the rules system that allows you to determine how incoming and outgoing mail is handled (for example, if the message is from the boss, send a note to my pager and pop up a message).

Outlook 2000 rules will sometimes stop working and messages will not be processed until you restart Windows.

Share and Share Not Alike

One of Outlook's more interesting features is Net Folders. First introduced with Outlook 98, Net Folders allow you to share the contents of any of your Outlook folders with other Outlook users.

To do this, you need to have the Net Folders add-in installed and enabled. Without going through the whole process of sharing a folder, you finally wind up entering the e-mail address of the person with whom you wish to share data.

If the recipient is using Outlook, they get a message inviting them to share the folder and are presented with buttons offering Accept or Decline.

If the recipient accepts, the "sharer" automatically sends a copy of everything in that folder. Depending on the privileges the sharee is assigned, they can read, add or delete items. Non-Outlook users can be assigned Reviewer status, which provides read-only access.

There are a couple of consequences to this: First, Net Folders can generate a serious amount of traffic. Second, you had better ensure that you make appointments and other items private. Otherwise all subscribers get to see everything you're up to.

Unfortunately, there's no way to have items default to private, so be ready to make mistakes and reveal that you're scheduled to attend Hackers Anonymous.

Feeling Buggy

The problem is that there's a major bug in Net Folders: You'll find out when Outlook bombs and brings up an error message saying there was an invalid page fault in fldpub.dll.

This fldpub.dll library drives the Net Folders service, but it appeared to be only one of the pieces of software that was having problems when I first looked into this. The reason was that Norton CrashGuard successfully restarted Outlook, which in turn caused subsequent problems in other Dynamic Link Libraries, making the problem seem even larger.

The cause of the problems with fldpub.dll is apparently not known. The relevant technical articles I found on Microsoft's Web site are fabulously vague: See articles Q229962 "OL2000: Troubleshooting Net Folders," Q196109 "OL98: ErrMsg: Illegal Page Fault in Fldpub.dll" and Q196297 "OL98: Troubleshooting Net Folders."

And the worst is yet to come: The Outlook 2000 article, Q229962, refers you to the Outlook 98 article, Q196109--which suggests using a utility called nfclean.exe that can trash your entire Outlook installation (as it did when I tried it).

There appears to be no neat solution to this problem other than removing Net Folders support and doing without it.

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