Any automated server processes that can change an emails Modified date

[splufdaddy]

I went to run AutoArchive today through Outlook, and it didn't archive anything. I haven't run it in a while, and I set up a new archive.pst to catch any email older than 3 months. I have email in my inbox from the begining of the year, and nothing was autoarchived.

I added the Modified column to my view in Outlook, and about half of the emails in my inbox were last modified on the same date: 4/5/2005 1:42pm. Nothing is older than that date. That explains why nothing auto archived.

I took a look at the Administrator mailbox, and it has fewer messages, but it looks like the same thing is going on. The last dozen or so messages all have the exact same modified time to the minute, for a date in March.

The primary question is what could cause this? I looked at the server logs for that day and didn't find anything out of the ordinary. I didn't do any type of import that day into my mailbox, or anything else that comes to mind that could explain this. I'd like to find the cause of this so it can be fixed, because I'd like to be able to auto archive my mailbox.

For the time being, is there any way to change the field that auto archive looks at to determine whether to archive or not? I'd like it to look at the recieve date instead of the modified date, because the modified date is skewed.

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[zbnet]

See this article for a list of client-based actions that alter the modified date of messages - some of them are non-intuitive.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197981/

There is no easy way to change the modified date to an older date once updated.

 

[splufdaddy]

Thanks, that's definately some good information. Unfortuantely, I don't see anything in there that would cause a few hundred messages to all have the exact same "modified by" date. If anyone has any guesses, I'm all ears.



Thanks again.

 

[zbnet]

You didn't reorganise your folders with a bulk message move? This is the most common cause of large blocks of email having the same modified datestamp.

 

[splufdaddy]

Nope. These messages are in my inbox right now. They were delivered there, and they've been there since January. They didn't have any flags, some were replied to, but they weren't all replied to at the same instant in April. I can't think of anything that I've done to these messages in months. They've just been pushed further down in my inbox, and I'm finally getting around to some house cleaning.

As a full disclosure, this exchange server is new as of March 20th. I imported my entire PST into my Exchange mailbox on March 20th. So if this date were March 20th, that would be one thing. But the date is 2.5 weeks later, and I can't figure out what changed it. Thanks for your help!

 

[zbnet]

Do you have a laptop that you synchronise with your mailbox?

 

[splufdaddy]

Nope. But Outlook on my home computer has a profile set up to connect to my Exchange mailbox via RPC-HTTP. I do that on a semi-regular basis, and definately since 4/5/06. However, if 4/5/06 was the day I created the Outlook profile (I cant remember), would that have changed the modified date?

 

[zbnet]

This shouldn't have made any difference to the last modified times of your emails (unbless you did anything with them).

Maybe you'll never discover the root cause of this particular change, but at least you're now more aware of the criteria for archiving and the possible ways it is affected by changes to the last modified date.

 

[splufdaddy]

Fortunately this isn't a major problem, just more of an annoyance. Thanks for the help and the knowledge.