Entourage 2004 sp2 randomly deleting messages

S

Samantha

Since my company applied SP 2 for Mac Office, we've had a very
concerning problem occur. A number of users have lost all messages,
personal folders, calendar items and server side contacts when working
offsite. The deletion occurs both on the client and server side.

We found a very similar issue in Microsoft's article kb909574, which
details a problem when Entourage attempts to synch for the first time
after a mailbox has been moved. Mailboxes had not been moved in any of
these instances, but we had all users apply the update mentioned in the
article (update 11.2.1) in the hopes that it may correct our problem as
well. We now have at least one instance of the problem occurring post
patching.

We believe that in all cases, users were accessing mail offsite from a
slow internet connection, but we're not positive about the slow
connection bit.

In some cases, all messages are wiped out, along with calendar items
and contacts. Any manually created folders are deleted. In other
cases, messages in system folders (inbox, sent, trash) are spared.
Strangely enough, this does not include items in the calendar or
contacts, which are lost. In all cases, the items do not appear in the
trash nor in recover deleted items area.

We've checked rules, mailing list manager items and junk filtering and
have ruled them out as suspects.

Has anyone seen this, or have any inkling of a fix or work around?
Thanks
 
S

Samantha

We ended up calling Microsoft. "Uh, remove and recreate the identity
on the machines. Good luck with that." was the response. Not good
news, given that we have over 100 macs.
We discovered that there was a problem with our backup software
(Arcserve), that appears to have started right around the same time
this issue began. I'm not sure from the timeline, but I'm thinking
that these deletions occurred when these people accessed mail from
offsite during the nighttime, when the backup was occurring. We've got
a handle on the backup problem, and I'm hoping that there was a
correlation between the two, and the deletions will stop. So far so
good.
 
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