Vanishing emails

[shipmate]

I've had several instances of email's "vanishing" from inboxes.

This has happened to 4 users so far (including myself). An email will be in the inbox, and a few hours later, it's simply not there. It's happening about 1-2 times per week. Nothing in event viewer, deleted items, quarantine, etc.

Plenty of space left on the server, inboxes are between 20 and 500 megs. Clients are using Outlook 2k, NT 4.0 sp6a.

The server is NT 4.0, sp6a, Exchange 5.5 sp4, norton antivirus for exchange.

Anybody have any ideas? The server hasn't had an offline defrag ever (1+ year, but we're a small company). I haven't found any kb articles at the M$ site either relating to this.

Any ideas? I'll be upgrading to Win2k and Exchange 2k in the next month or 2, but I'd love to figure out whats going on.

Shipmate

 

[Stealth2K]

1st thing to check is who has Exch Admin rights sounds like someone is playing with you or, assigning permissions on mailboxes to dissprove this as soon as mail is noticed missing check last logon to mailbox....

 

[shipmate]

Good try; I gave it a shot, no luck.

I changed a few passwords anyway, and checked rights to everybodies mailboxes (small network, easy to do)

Any other ideas? Nobody else has had this happen to them? At least it gives me a good reason to upgrade

 

[Vos]

From exchange administrator, does the number of messages in the mailbox decrease by 1 when a message goes missing or does it still show the same number of messages, but they're missing in Outlook?

 

[shipmate]

From Exchange administrator, they're actually missing from the mailbox.

I tried checking the mailbox with a different email client (after your post; good idea) but the messages aren't there.

I asked around, looks like it's 5 people, missing about 2-3 messages a week.

I use Arcserve 2k with an Exchange agent for backing up email; any connection?

 

[FAChester]

This there a rule on to move the messages to a different folder. Can you do a search on the mailbox for messages recieved on a specif day for example. Are the mailboxes concerned using a different "View"??

 

[shipmate]

I just checked 2 of the clients, there are no rules in place. All the problems pc's are using different views.....

Could there be a server option to move uses's emails somewhere?

How about other server options? Could attachments make a difference?

Thanks for the help! Please keep em coming!

Shipmate

 

[Chaupa]

Almost every time I have seen this type of thing it is either a rule or a view.
Have you played with Advanced find all PST files and server side mail?
View - Current view - all messages.
Does any of them have multiple profiles that would pull mail off the server based on a rule.
Are any of the mailboxes shared out?
Just some thoughts

 

[hup]

Is your mail reside in your server? If yes, why not try download to your personal folder.

 

[Chaupa]

We prefer to have the users store the mail on the server for up 30 days. This gives us a backed up copy of mail, keeps the single instance storage, and allows us to scan for viruses. Not to mention a PST can become corrupt, deleted or stolen.
We generally (I use that term with loosely) do not have to support PST files by providing storage.

 

[mmarcos]

You might want to make sure that the properties of Outlook in the machine that user logs to, On the "services" tab, Make sure that it is going on the Microsoft Exchange Server instead of Personal Folders ( .PST file on C or D local drive. ). I had a similar situation with one user. He would get an email and as soon as he open it, it would go straight to the pst file. Which is a no-no.
All you have to do is make sure that the user profile's properties doesn't have "personal Folders" unless that user is using it for Archiving Purposes.

Any questions, let me know. Marvin