Outlook clears my inbox

[EcoWill]

Hi All,
I have Office 2010 Outlook on my home machine and the inbox clears ALL mail by itself constantly. The Inbox folder is always empty. I can't see any pattern for this and have checked through every setting feature until I give up. I do not want my inbox emptied EVER, let alone every few seconds. Any thoughts on this? Thanks

 

[SBTBILL]

Check your auto-delete settings on your e-mail account settings. Are you using POP3 or IMAP?

nandy@sbtbill.com

 

[EcoWill]

It is IMAP. But the issue is that I have searched, but never seen any settings in Outlook for the auto-deleting of the INBOX. There are settings for emptying trash, But not the inbox. If you know where this exists i would love to know. Important emails are disappearing. If I want to keep emails i have to print them because THEY WILL VANISH.

 

[swade2569]

Do you have any other mail clients accessing the same mailbox? Are they set to remove mail from the server?

I had a similar problem with an Office 2008 for the Mac user. He was using Entourage and it was deleting mail. Oddly enough when I checked the logs on the Exchange server, the delete commands were being issued by the client.

We ended up deleting the local database (Entourage uses something like "Cached Exchange mode") and the random deletion problems stopped.

Perhaps if you are using Cached Exchange mode, you could turn it off so the DB gets cleared and see if that helps?

HTH

 

[EcoWill]

Well...um...NOPE! This is just a home computer. Interestingly, my folder size is set to 0 bytes, and the only commands I can find are to reduce it further (less than zero?) but no options to increase it. This is probably a big clue, but I am clueless.

 

[Madawc]

As a work-round, create a folder to store your e-mails. I do this at work, separate files including one for each month's input, and if you move the older folders to Personal Files you can keep them indefinitely.

Since I've no idea why your version is deleting files, I can't promise that it won't officioulsy delete the files from other folders as well. But it may have reached its limits: get the folder list and right-click, choose Properties and Folder List to check.

Another option, choose File > Save As and you can save your e-mail as a document, text or HTML.

Madawc Williams (East Anglia, UK). Using Crystal 11.5 with SQL and Windows XP

 

[zelgar]

Check and see if your emails are going to the Deleted Items folder or in the Archive Folders

 

[EcoWill]

Thanks madawc and zelgar. They are not going into the deleted or archive folders - they are simply vanishing. This is a brand new Office 2010 installation btw. I can try creating a new folder maybe and calling it something else besides Inbox maybe. How about WTFbox.

 

[Madawc]

I've got Office 2003. As far as I know, you can call new files any name you like and it will always put new e-mail in the Inbox. You have to move them yourself, unless you can set up an automatic procedure, which I haven't tried.

Madawc Williams (East Anglia, UK). Using Crystal 11.5 with SQL and Windows XP

 

[zelgar]

Are your emails being downloaded to your PC? It sounds like it's checking the server for the emails, then downloading the list, deleting them from your serverwithout moving the files to your hard drive, and then deleting them from your list (they're not on the server anymore).

 

[EcoWill]

To Zelgar: the files are actually going to my inbox on my hard drive, and removed from the email server (at the ISP). But when I close Outlook and re-open, the inbox folder is empty. And they are not in another folder unfortunately. They are gone. The biggest clue is that the Inbox is set to Zero bytes, but there is no setting to increase it in Ofc 2010 that i can find. Only to compact it or to make it smaller.
I am thinking that the whole thing is actually a bug in the software.

 

[ponoodle]

I have never seen this, but if it were me, I would delete the old PST file and make a new one. Or, keep the old PST file, make a new one and use a rule to move all your mail to the new one as you receive them.

 

[EcoWill]

Yep.