Exchange 2003 Loosing Blocks of Email
Everyone, I've administered Exchange servers since 5.0, and never come across this. In the last week, 3 of my 320 users have lost blocks of email. For example a block of 3 weeks from the InBox, or all emails from a person between two dates, or all subfolders form the InBox. Today one user lost the entire InBox before today. I've ruled out user error & auto archiving, and the OST file (the emails are also gone from the server). Outlook and Exchange are running normally apart from these incidents.The problem mailboxes are in two different Information Stores on two different servers. If email is being lost like this, I would suspect the store to fall over, but it's running normally. I haven't got a window to dismount it and run an integrity check.The deleted emails are retrieveable using Recover Deleted Items, and the time they're showing as deleted areduring the night when laptops are off, so I've ruled out a client issue, and am focusing on server.Some of the users affected have Blackberry's, others do not.Has anyone heard of this behaviour? Thanks in Advance, Nick
August 28th, 2009 1:11pm

I'm with you. I have yet to see where such "disappearances" have been traced to the Information Store except when an administrator runs ESEUTIL to repair a damaged database, a process that can indeed destroy content. You might have a combination of a few coincidental user errors causing this. Here are some things you might want to check.- If the user loses the entire Inbox folder, and I mean the folder plus the content, then it could be that the user inadvertantly dragged (moved)it underneath another folder. I've done that with folders before myself.- If the users loses just the content of the Inbox folder, a likely cause is that he or she connected with an Outlook client that has delivery set to a PST. If he or she can find that machine, fix the delivery setting back to the mailbox and find the PST, he or she can drag all the mail back into the mailbox's Inbox. Any client connecting via POP3 cause the same thing.- Outlook views can hide content that's really there.- Desktop-based synchronization, especially PDA and BlackBerry devices,have long beena cause of mysterious content disappearances.- Antivirus programs can cause problems that result in loss of data.
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August 28th, 2009 7:23pm

Are you running E2K3 Mailbox Manager or E2K7 Messaging Records Management?Jim McBee - Blog - http://mostlyexchange.blogspot.com
August 30th, 2009 5:51am

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