I have just found a program online that can, supposedly, recover lost Outlook
passwords. I downloaded it and the trial (free) version gave me the first
two letters of every password for every account on both profiles. I'm
impressed - that should be enough to jog my memory.

It saves them in a *.csv file along with the email address. Normally,
security would be an issue for me, but I will be doing a factory restore on
this 3 year old computer, and I can easily change the passwords on those
accounts after I restore everything.

I still don't like the fact that Microsoft doesn't seem to offer an easy way
to save and restore email account settings. There is no logical reason to
have removed that feature from the previous version that I can see, unless
they were worried about unauthorized users accessing someone's computer and
using that feature to steal their information. Regardless, it would be nice
to at least have a copy of the profiles and account settings, even without
the passwords, in some nice little file location with a name - something that
could be found and copied.

I'm still looking for feedback if anyone knows any techniques.

"Kasey156" wrote:

I am on XPsp2 and Outlook 2007, and have two profiles with a total of 11
email accounts. Two of these are for non-profit organizations I help out.

I am caught in a situation where I need to "clean house" on this computer,
and for the life of me don't remember the passwords to at least half of the
accounts. In addition, some have fairly odd advanced settings, such as the
AOL and Yahoo accounts. I was trying to avoid manually copying down the
settings for each account on each profile, but the more research I do, the
more I am seeing that prior to doing any major system overhaul, I am going to
be forced to copy down all those settings and try to retrieve the passwords.

Does anyone have any suggestions for me?