Mail disappearing from Entourage/Exchange

B

Barry

Hello,
I have a user with a new PowerBook (Intel-based) with OS X 10.4.6 and
Entourage 11.2.3. She also has a Mac Mini (OS X 10.4.5 Entourage
11.2.1). Her mailbox is approximatily 5 GB in size. All of a sudden
she her mailbox size is down to 400 MB and most of her mail (filed
primairly in subfolders under Inbox) is gone. Not all folders, just
seemingly randmon ones. (She is a very technically compenent user, so
I have confidently ruled out user error). The mail is not in the
Deleted Items folder - it' just gone. Has anyone else seen this type
of behavior?
Thanks,
Barry
 
B

Barry Wainwright [MVP]

Hello,
I have a user with a new PowerBook (Intel-based) with OS X 10.4.6 and
Entourage 11.2.3. She also has a Mac Mini (OS X 10.4.5 Entourage
11.2.1). Her mailbox is approximatily 5 GB in size. All of a sudden
she her mailbox size is down to 400 MB and most of her mail (filed
primairly in subfolders under Inbox) is gone. Not all folders, just
seemingly randmon ones. (She is a very technically compenent user, so
I have confidently ruled out user error). The mail is not in the
Deleted Items folder - it' just gone. Has anyone else seen this type
of behavior?
Thanks,
Barry
Click to expand...

First step is to try a rebuild,

Office vX:
Hold down the option key when starting Entourage and take the first option
('typical rebuild'). If this doesn¹t resolve the problems, then try an
ŒAdvanced Rebuild¹.

Office 2004:
You still call the rebuilder by holding down Option key at launch, but it
now brings up a separate app "Database Utility" (which could be launched by
double-clicking of you wish) that lives in the Office subfolder.

First of all, if you have any Office apps open, a dialog comes up that
offers to quit them.

Then you get a window with a list of your identities to select from, and
four options:

1) It has a new feature "Verify database integrity" option: this should
reduce unnecessary rebuilding. Apparently it's quite sensitive. And see 4)
below.

2) "Compact the database". (Like X's "Typical rebuild").

3) Rebuild the database. (Like X's "Advanced Rebuild")

4) "Set database preferences". Actually there's only one pref: you can turn
on "Verify database in background "which means "run automatically" and let
you know if your database needs rebuilding.
 
B

Barry

Barry,
Thanks for your input. However, since Entourage is hooked up to an
Exchange Server, the information was sync'ed back to Exchange, and it
was deleted there and is no longer available. I tried the Verify
Database Integrity option after the user reported the missing mail, but
it came back clean.
Bascially, I had to restore her Exchange mailbox from backup. Since
this user has a lot of mail and is in upper management, I've been
pressed to find out why this happened and to prevent it from happening
again.
Any more insight that you could provide will be helpful. Thanks!
 
C

Corentin Cras-Méneur

Barry said:
All of a sudden
she her mailbox size is down to 400 MB and most of her mail (filed
primairly in subfolders under Inbox) is gone.
Click to expand...

Any chance she has performed a database rebuild not long ago??
When you rebuild the database, rules get confused and instead of moving
e-mails properly in the Exchange folders as they are directed to, they
send them to other fodlers (usually the inbox "on my computer"). Rules
need to be checked and re-set properly after such rebuids.

That could explain quite a few things. Did you try a serach o the local
folders to see if any of the e-mails is there ??


Corentin
 
B

Barry

I asked, and she did mention that she was disconnected for a brief
period on Friday (the day this all went down).
Did you see this same type of behavior - most, but not all, of the mail
just disappearing? Any idea why this is - some kind of bug in this
version of Entourge?
Thanks for your input!
 
R

Richard Scott

Is there any possibilities that your Exchange server has retention
policies...when the Mac sync'ed it may have triggered a retention policy to
delete emails after a certain period of time...or if the date/time was
changed locally on the Mac...it may have triggered a rule/policy to archive
or delete emails.
 
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