Re: Outlook11 Fetching mail (POP) then destroying it -- serious problem

From: Andrew Murray (admurray_at_iinet.net.au)
Date: 01/18/05 

Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 18:55:18 +0800

You could try an Outlook Newsgroup. This group is for Web development &
Frontpage.

"///Matt" <SpammersDieSlowly@MyHand.tld> wrote in message
news:%23btHkOU$EHA.1300@TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl...
> One installation of Outlook (from Office11) has chosen to retrieve mail
> from all configured accounts (6), and place it... nowhere. This is a new
> behavior, exhibited on a three-month-old installation. The result is that
> inbound messages are lost, and since the server did it's job, the sender
> has no way of knowing the message was destroyed. This is an alarming and
> expensive behavior. So far, Office11 hasn't been a particularly buggy
> package, but quality seems to be making up for quantity in that regard.
>
> Things we have already tried:
> * Deleting and recreating two test accounts -- their inbound mail was
> still destroyed.
> * Assuring the "deliver mail to" settings are correct (it would not have
> surprised me to find an invalid Send To setting being honored without
> generating an error).
> * Using the installers "repair" function (not sure it did anything)
> * Reviewing the mail server's logs, and even packet sniffing the POP
> sessions to confirm the mail is being fetched and not eaten by the server;
> this confirmed that the mail server is not the problem.
> * Sending test messages, then searching the PST files for keywords from
> them (using non-encrypted non-compressed PSTs of course) -- they were not
> to be found. I don't know if it should, but the PST files did not change
> size after test messages were eaten.
> * Scanning all local hard drives at the sector level for phrases embedded
> in test messages (write cache disabled) -- not fast on 0.5TB drives --
> offered no help.
> * Disabling all but TCP/POP3 access off the machine, to assure the
> messages weren't being saved to some network path.
> * Assured there are no "macros" at all, let alone any which would divert
> incoming mail (at least the UI says there aren't any, and I know of no
> other way to check).
>
> Complete removal and reinstallation of Outlook would be a last resort,
> because A) it's inability to isolate and save it's settings makes setting
> up this installation a multi-hour process, and B) the registry settings
> are never properly cleared, and doing so manually usually throws the rest
> of Office into a tizzy (a true reinstallation of Office requires
> formatting the disk and rebuilding this workstation, which is 20+ hours
> work -- [developer's station - hundreds of aps, thousands of settings,
> etc.]).
>
> Any ideas? Has anyone seen this new 'toss mail into a black hole'
> behavior before (perhaps it's only new to us)? Assuming the prior will be
> "no" and "no", does anyone have any ideas for sniffing it out? You can
> imagine what kind of trouble this bug is causing -- losing client mail is
> "not good". We're duplicating mail at the server as a (hopefully)
> temporary workaround; it's a real nightmare. May go to IMAP temporarily,
> but would rather it just worked.
>
> Is there a debug log we can turn on? Only useful if it logs events in
> such a way as to be comprehensible by someone without the source code to
> Outlook.
>
> Thanks for any help or ideas,
> -///Matt
>
>
>

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