Mail Threads View question

[scott4381]

Hi everyone,
I am a Help Desk tech at my corporation. We use Lotus Notes client 6.0.2CF2. I have had a few clients question the "Mail Threads" view within their mail databases. I know what this is used for and can explain it to users, but I can't explain this: for one client, emails showing up within the Mail Threads view do not show up anywhere else in the mail database!! How is this possible? I thought this view only showed emails that were in other parts of the DB, such as Inbox or Sent. Shouldn't emails showing up in Mail Threads be deleted if their corresponding entry in the Inbox or Sent (or any other) views are deleted? Can someone clear this up? Thanks

 

[pmonett]

At the very least, the documents should show up in the All Documents view.
If that is not the case, there is probably view corruption in that database and the Notes admin should run a Fixup on it.

Pascal.

 

[scott4381]

Hey Pascal, thanks for the reply. Yes, the documents show up in All Documents view, but we can't figure out where else they're stored! They must have been in some folder (Inbox, sent, trash, personal folder) at one time, but if they were deleted from one of those locations, shouldn't they have been deleted from Mail Threads?

 

[pmonett]

I think you might need an explanation on the difference between folders and views.
A folder is a list of documents the user defines.
A view is a list of documents defined by the design.
For example, the Sent view lists all the documents that you have sent (and saved), whether or not that doc has been also placed in a folder. The All Documents view lists all the documents of the database, regardless of them having been sent or not, or stored in other folders. Mail Threads is also a view, and it shows documents based on the following rule :
- the doc is not hidden
- the messageType field is empty
- the doc is not a Stationary
- the doc is not specifically excluded from the view
- the form is not a person or a group form

Thus, it is quite possible to have a doc show up in Mail Threads without it showing in any folder - it's the user who puts docs in folders, not the code. The one exception to that rule is the Inbox, which is a folder, but it's the server that places incoming in there, not the design of the database.

Whatever the user does in his folders - apart from deleting the document, of course - will not remove the doc from the All Documents view since it is a view and the design dictates that all docs in the database should show up there.
Put broadly, all the folders of a database can be empty - that does not mean the database contains no documents.

So, this user's mail db got its folders broken and no longer listing any docs - but unless docs are deleted, they are still in the db and therefore they show up in All Documents.

As to where else they can be stored, there is unfortunately no easy answer to that without a bit of coding.

Pascal.