Restoring Hidden Dialog Boxes

When you sort Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 messages by category, you can select a category heading and press Delete to delete the entire category. Outlook then displays the warning This action will apply to all items in the selected groups and a check box saying Please do not show me this dialog again. I selected the check box, but have since changed my mind. How can I get that dialog box back?

Information about the dialog boxes that Outlook 2003 is hiding resides in the HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice11.0OutlookOptionsGeneral registry subkey in a REG_SZ value that has the name PONT_STRING. The text in the registry value, if present, consists of one or more numbers, each followed by a comma. Each suppressed dialog box corresponds to a different number. With a little trial and error, I've compiled the list of code numbers that Table 1 shows for a few of the most common dialog boxes.

The code for the bulk deletion dialog box is 31. To restore it, simply delete "31,"—including the trailing comma—from the PONT_STRING registry value.

The same technique also works in earlier versions of Outlook. Just replace 11.0 in the registry subkey with 10.0 for Outlook 2002 or 9.0 for Outlook 2000.