Disable Outlook Preview Pane
I had a run in with Outlook’s preview pane today. A new mail message arrived, and for whatever reason, every time preview pane tried to load it, Outlook started going crazy. It would use 98% of the CPU endlessly. The problem was since this was the most recent message in my inbox, Outlook would automatically try and open it in the preview pane when I loaded Outlook. So I was stuck. I knew the best bet would be to disable the preview pane, load Outlook, delete the offending message, and re-enable preview pane. But since on launch outlook would busy itself tryiing to do something with this message it wouldn’t let me into the settings to disable the preview pane.
I set out to find out what registry key I could set to disable the preview pane, and found out if you launch outlook with the /nopreview option it will do this for you. I added this to my outlook shortcut, launched outlook, deleted the message, closed outlook, removed the /nopreview option and launch outlook again. Problem solved.
May 18th, 2006 at 8:00 am
Here’s another thing you can do. Change your Outlook shortcut to point to “thunderbird.exe” and quit using Outlook. Once again, problem solved.
May 18th, 2006 at 11:33 pm
i hope that msg wasn’t important?
May 30th, 2006 at 11:15 am
Another option would have been to pop into your hotmail or gmail account and send yourself another message. That way the offending message would no longer be on top. Would have taken 30 seconds.
June 15th, 2006 at 7:41 pm
I’m trying to figure out how to create a script that temporarily disables the SPACEBAR shortcut in preview pane. Currently, when users click the spacebar while in the preview pane, it moves them to the next message. Is there a way to temporarily disable this upon delivery of an HTML email?
Thanks,
Maria
July 8th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
I used this posting to fix the same issue. Thanks!
Wulfgar, thanks for your useful advice. I’m sure many corporate employees who have admin on their machine will do that. That’s about 4%.