HELP!! User e-mail disappearing.

[cbailey]

This may sound Halloweenish but here it goes.

People are noticing that their entire inbox and sent folder messages in Outlook and Outlook express are disappearing. The only thing in the inbox is the first setup message you get when you set up a new account.

I checked for any worms that may do this, but am coming up with nothing.

Any ideas?

 

[JockMullin]

Hi, cbailey

Just a guess, but have you checked their outlook data files? How big are they and when were they created?

Are they using the same user accounts? Logging in as a different user will do that. So will deleting/recreating their account.

What is the environment? Are their msgs stored locally or on a server?

Jock

 

[smah]

There were a couple of versions of McAfee ViruScan that would do this with OE, - but I don't know about Outlook and I don't think that it left the 'welcome to' message.

A modified view setting could do this, but it seems unlikely that multiple people would have done it to multiple folders.

The only other thing that I can think of is that (for whatever reason), these users created new Identities (OE) or Profiles (Outlook). You might want to search their drives for old mail - *.dbx and *.pst

 

[cbailey]

This happend on a Windows 2000 workstation and NT 4.0

IE 6 SP1 with patches

I looked at the dbx file under the user profile and compaired it to a backup version from days prior(826 k). the file was about the same size so I tried copying it over to replace the existing one. It didn't matter, the inbox is still empty. If I try to import the dbx file, I get an error that the mail file is empty.

Users cannot log into the machine other than themselves.

I even tried renaming the file, again no difference.

OE must me looking elsewhere for the mail files.
Any other ideas?

Thanks

 

[Craino]

Could auto-archiving possibly have been setup incorrectly to archive everything somewhere?

 

[cbailey]

Archivig is unselected

 

[Craino]

How about inbox rules that delete or move that they forgot about?

 

[justdanuk]

have you considered dumping the DBX files? if you have a damaged inbox.dbx it can cause this problem amongst others...

Peace