A
Amedee Van Gasse
Outlook 2003 & Exchange 2003.
One of our users used the rules in the Out Of Office Assistant to move
all email with a certain condition to a folder. I don't remember what
the condition was, perhaps something with sender or subject, but that
is not important.
The important thing was that he made a rule to move those emails to a
folder inside a PST file. He wanted to avoid that he went over quota
on Exchange while on holiday.
The result when he came back: in his pst-file he saw the list of
emails, but he couldn't open any of them. He got a message (in Dutch,
roughly translated back to Engrish): "Can not open the item. This
action will be supported when the entire message is downloaded.
Download the message and try again."
When moving such mail to the Exchange Inbox, Outlook says that the
mail may have been deleted from the server, and the message disappears
without a trace, not even in deleted items.
I'm quite sure that he got this problem because he used a rule that
referenced a PST file, making it a client-side rule. In case of
regular Rules&Alerts, it really doesn't matter much if a rule is
client-side or server side, but in case of the OOOA, I think it does.
It is my theory that Exchange thought it had moved the mail off the
server (so it deletes the mail body) but it only registers the mail
metadata (subject, size,... the things you see in the emails list) in
the PST file. It couldn't actually move to PST because the Exchange
server doesn't know where to find the PST file.
I'm 99% sure that this is the cause of the problem, but I would like
to find some "official" confirmation; a KB article from Microsoft
would be best. I have searched but didn't find anything useful yet,
only general descriptions of how the OOOA works.
This is because I need to document the incident and inform our users
that they shouldn't use PST files in rules. (They shouldn't use PST
files *period*, but that's not up to me)
Kind regards,
Amedee
One of our users used the rules in the Out Of Office Assistant to move
all email with a certain condition to a folder. I don't remember what
the condition was, perhaps something with sender or subject, but that
is not important.
The important thing was that he made a rule to move those emails to a
folder inside a PST file. He wanted to avoid that he went over quota
on Exchange while on holiday.
The result when he came back: in his pst-file he saw the list of
emails, but he couldn't open any of them. He got a message (in Dutch,
roughly translated back to Engrish): "Can not open the item. This
action will be supported when the entire message is downloaded.
Download the message and try again."
When moving such mail to the Exchange Inbox, Outlook says that the
mail may have been deleted from the server, and the message disappears
without a trace, not even in deleted items.
I'm quite sure that he got this problem because he used a rule that
referenced a PST file, making it a client-side rule. In case of
regular Rules&Alerts, it really doesn't matter much if a rule is
client-side or server side, but in case of the OOOA, I think it does.
It is my theory that Exchange thought it had moved the mail off the
server (so it deletes the mail body) but it only registers the mail
metadata (subject, size,... the things you see in the emails list) in
the PST file. It couldn't actually move to PST because the Exchange
server doesn't know where to find the PST file.
I'm 99% sure that this is the cause of the problem, but I would like
to find some "official" confirmation; a KB article from Microsoft
would be best. I have searched but didn't find anything useful yet,
only general descriptions of how the OOOA works.
This is because I need to document the incident and inform our users
that they shouldn't use PST files in rules. (They shouldn't use PST
files *period*, but that's not up to me)
Kind regards,
Amedee