A user clean reinstalled Windows and Outlook. Following this operation, all the top-level emails in his mailbox (ie in the inbox folder) disappeared. Sub-folders remained intact. There were around 4000 lost emails. I did a mailbox restore and merge from a two-day old backup which fixed the immediate problem. However, I've not come across anything like this before. I can't see anything in the event viewer that looks like it could have caused this problem. The emails are not in the deleted items folder. Anyone got ideas as to how this might have happened, or can give me a clue what to look for? Tim

Did you configure any other outlook clients to download these emails to a PST? Santhosh Sivarajan | MCTS, MCSE (W2K3/W2K/NT4), MCSA (W2K3/W2K/MSG), CCNA, Network+ Houston, TX http://blogs.sivarajan.com/ http://publications.sivarajan.com/ This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Santhosh Thanks for the comment. Bear in mind that I can't be sure what the user may have done; however he is technically competent. He says he did not. Nor is it something like auto-archive since even emails only a day or two old were lost. The only clue is that a few emails turned up in a conflicts subfolder under "sync issues" - but only 100 or so out of 4000. Tim

Hi Tim, If you could not reproduce the issue. It’s not easy to troubleshooting the reason of mail lost last time. It looks like other applications/clients downloaded the mail via pop3 or some rules moved the mails to somewhere. In order to troubleshoot the issue, you could disable all third party software in the client and make no more client access the mailbox at the same time. Then see if the issue can be reproduced. Thanks, Elvis

Hi Tim, How things are going? Any update on the issue? Regards, Elvis

Elvis I have no idea what caused this. I restored from backup and it is working OK. I don't understand though where these emails went. What is particularly odd is that only the top-level emails in the inbox disappeared; emails in sub-folders remained. Tim

Hi Tim, As I mentioned above, if the issue is not reproducible, it’s not easy to troubleshooting the reason of mail lost last time. Maybe it's moved by some third party software, add-in or something like that... Thanks, Elvis