Mail missing froom Inbox

[guggle]

A user of mine told me that a lot (several hundred) of messages have disappeared from his inbox. I don't believe he has accidentily deleted them because the number missing is too high. I've gone into mailbox resources for this user and can see that he has around 1600 items but when I add up all the messages in his folders there is a discrepancy of several hundred. Is it possible that his email are hidden or something?? If not, is there any way of easily restoring them. We use Backup Exec 8.5 but without the Exchange option (each time the backup runs, it runs a batch file that stops all of the Exchange services before starting).

Please help, as I am relativley new at Exchange admin...

 

[remain]

a few things could be happening:

if you store messages on the server, you could have a mailbox manager running that deletes the old messages, if this is the case, depending on the tombstone clock, you could recover them using outlook.

if you store them on the client machine using .pst files, they could be archiving to an archive .pst file. search for any other .pst files on the harddrive and see if they are there. finally you can corrupt and restore his main pst to recover all the deleted items since the last time the .pst was compacted. Let me know if any of these apply and if you want me to expand on any of them.

 

[zbnet]

Check for folder rules, and filters.

 

[guggle]

Remain,

Thanks for your reply.

Our mail is stored on the server. I'm not sure what you mean by a mailbox manager. What is this and how do I check the tombstone clock? If this is running would it run for all users or just selected ones?

 

[remain]

sorry it wasn't tombstone, that is the time it keeps deleted objects before deleting them... you want the "deleted item retention time" that is found in the general tab on the properties window of the private information store.
Mailbox manager is a service that you can have running to clean out old mail. I think you access it in the add-ins section under configuration...it can be set up to run at specific times to clean out old stuff. It can be set up to exclude mailboxes.

 

[guggle]

I've checked both of those options and it doesn't appear to be the cause of the problem - I don't even think mailbox manager is even installed. Thanks for your help anyway.

 

[zbnet]

If you've ruled out all the automatic mechanisms that delete or move messages (have you checked ant olaptop OST files, or POP3/IMAP4 clients?), then it was probably user error that resulted in him deleting them - regardless of what he says he did or didn't do. Mail messages just don't go missing for no reason at all.