You know Microsoft Outlook?

It can unequivocally Fuck Off.

Too many hours in your day? Time hanging a little heavy on your hands? Then try this and your spare time will disappear, like a fart in a high wind.

Get an Outlook 2000 PST file that silently corrupted and try to recover as many emails as possible from it. The best way to do this is to use the Microsoft's PST Crop Circle tool (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=296088), named after the way it turns up, flattens large tracts of your email in an almost logical pattern, then buggers off laughing. To find the maximum number of mails recoverable, start by excising 50Mb, run the humorously titled Repair Tool, wait 30 minutes, then wince. Try again with a smaller amount, and repeat. What do you mean you haven't got an arbitrary number of half-hours available?

Be warned, the result won't generally have less than 25M of email gone. If 85% of your mail is less than 50K long, you stand to lose over 500 emails. Just as well you have a good memory, because otherwise you might have been slightly inconvenienced.

Now, get the emails out of there and into Outlook 2003, which you have purchased at eye-watering expense to prevent this situation occurring again, because (like me) you are beautifully sweet and naive and believe the assertion that problems like this do not occur in the more up-to-date product. No, don't try and import them directly from the old PST - that doesn't work. Don't export them to a PST with OL 2K and try and open them with OL 2K3 - that also doesn't work. What you do it export them with 2K to a new PST, then separately import them using 2K3. You also don't want to stress the poor thing too much, so copy emails in batches of 1000 at a time. But don't expect the cursor to remain on the last file you viewed when you return to the folder!

Then, import using the "Humble Supplication to Gruppenfuhrer Gates" button and watch the progress bar zip to completion. Wow, pretty quick! I guess the £180 I spent on the upgrade to Office 2003 is worth it after all! Hang on.. why did the progress bar start over? Maybe it's doing a consistency check? Like fuck; after it runs through the progress bar 14 more times one comes to the conclusion that it ain't working. This is confirmed when you go to the imported folder - a truly random assortment of your emails have been withheld, presumably wedged up the computers digital ass.

So now, import again, using smaller slices of the inbox. And I mean small. When you hit the file that's causing the problem, the whole copy operation will fail, so you want to minimise your exposure by taking chunks of 500 at a time. Yeah, an inbox with 25000 files at 500 at a time - go on. Like you said, time was hanging on your hands. So why not use it for the computer equivalent of shovelling shit?