Missing emails that were deleted suddenly

E

EricSF8

We have an Exchange 2003 server hosted by Intermedia.net. We use
Entourage 11.3.6 to access the server.

Several days ago, a coworker reported that a large chunk of contiguous
messages were suddenly missing from his Inbox. Messages seemed fine
up to that point, then about 3 weeks of mail was missing, then the
mail messages started up again. The messages were there the day
before, and there was no evidence that the messages had been deleted.
In other words, they weren't in the Deleted Items either. They were
just gone. This was confirmed by looking at Outlook Web Access as
well, just to make sure we weren't experiencing a local database
corruption only.

Intermedia.net's tech support indicated:
- their logs showed a specific time that the server received
instructions to permanently delete that block of mail.
- the mail could be recovered, by using Outlook 2003 or 2007 on
Windows, and selecting Recover Deleted Items, as long as we noticed
that mail was missing within 14 days of the mail actually being
deleted (that's the Recover Deleted Items window.)
- the problem was a "known issue" with Entourage "when the database
gets too big."

I have never heard of such a "known issue." I have heard of the local
database becoming corrupt, but not suddenly having a large chunk of
messages disappear from both the local system and the server.

We recovered his mail. A day later, the problem occurred again.

Yet another day later, we decided to check several other email
accounts. In my own mail account, I noticed over a month's worth of
emails in the Sent Items folder were suddenly missing. Again, the
weren't on Outlook Web Access, and they weren't in my Deleted Items.

I used Outlook 2007 and its Recover Deleted Items, and found the
missing messages. Several hundred messages were suddenly deleted at a
very specific time. More strangely, though, was that there were 3
prior specific times that other blocks of messages were suddenly
deleted too. I restored them all.

At the same time, I deleted my local Entourage Identity and rebuild my
account settings from scratch.

Yet even after starting with a new database, and a fully updated
Entourage, and after waiting several hours, I kept checking the
Recover Deleted Items - only to find new blocks of messages were
deleted. Sometimes it was just one or two, and other times, it was
longer blocks of messages.

What's going on? What can I do to prevent this problem from happening?
Is this truly an Entourage problem? Or is it too coincidental, and
it's really a server problem? Please help!!

- EricSF8
 
C

Corentin Cras-Méneur

EricSF8 said:
- the problem was a "known issue" with Entourage "when the database
gets too big."

I had never heard of that.

[...]
What's going on? What can I do to prevent this problem from happening?
Is this truly an Entourage problem? Or is it too coincidental, and
it's really a server problem? Please help!!


At this point I really can't say... My exchange account is really
limited so it never gets "too big". It stops at 50MB.
When I reach the limit, the server sends me continuous notifications
that I have to deal with it. I don't think any message ever gets
deleted.

The problem in your case is to figure out where do the mesages get
deleted. I'm really surprised that Entourage would suddently decide to
delte messages on Exchange accounts. It could indeed be a server issue,
though I have no way to rule out that Entourage could be implicated.

Corentin
 

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