Re: Outlook/Exchange 500 MB of emails disappeared.

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Sunny Chakraborty wrote on Tue, 11 August 2009 12:22
Hi

Here's what happened.
The user has outlook configured as cached mode on his Vista Desktop.
He wanted to get his Outlook mails on his laptop so that he can work from home.
I created a new profile on his outlook. Configured outlook to download mails from the LAN. Also, I created a VPN link, so that he can remotely connect to the office network and download emails.

He went home fired-up the VPN and tried downloading emails. He says outlook send/receive didnt work. So he closed the notebook.
Next day he comes to office and he cant find mails from his outlook mailbox.

**Timeline**
8/3 - Mailbox size 733MB. OST file size about 700MB-1GB
8/4 - Mailbox size 150MB. OST file size 150MB

We tried to find out root-cause of this, but no clue till now.

**Pertinent Info:**
Emails disappeared selectively from some Folders in Mailbox - not all of them. There are emails in sent-items / inbox. Nothing like all emails before 60 days / or all messages greater than X size. I think this rules out any outlook archiving related cause.
Exchange mailbox retention policy set to 7 days
iPhone configured to receive emails from Ms Exchange.
Tried configuring Outlook MobileMe - but that didnt work because of Apple's restrictions
This affected only 1 user - no other users lost mails.

**Already tried-steps:**
Checked HDD/Notebook/Jump Drives for OST / PST copies. Nothing there.
Checked Archive Settings in desktop/laptop. No archive operation was run.
No delegates on mailbox
No mailbox management process running on Exchange Server
ExMerge Dumpster Recovery didnt yield the results (500 MB of lost mails)
No entries in eventviewer application / system / security logs related to outlook / exchange.
(Checked Event Viewer on desktop as well as exchange server)

Tried recovering using OnTrack Easy Recovery Pro, Email recovery using old .OST file didnt yield anything. It just replicated the existing mailbox structure.
Tried file-recovery (if the old .OST was over-written with new .OST file?) - Ontrack couldnt detect Vista HDD for some reason.

There was hardware issue with tape-backups, so we're missing some log-files. Already restored from last-good full-backup. That recovers mail items till 3/31 but not after that.

I'd really appreciate if anyone can advise possible troubleshooting options for this.

What caused 500MB of email deletion ?
How do we recover these emails.


Thanks
-Sunny



Hi,

Try demo of Kernel for Outlook recovery software, its worth trying as it aims for results: http://www.nucleustechnologies.com/Microsoft-Outlook-Mail-Recovery.html. Submitted using http://www.outlookforums.com
.

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