Hello, I'm new to the forum and a novice, but in desparate need of help.
I started having the same issue, i.e. missing sent items in Outloook 2003 and initially thought it had something to do with my auto-archive settings.
I have had 5 different Microsoft Techs look at the computer. The first 2 of them couldn't figure it out and encouraged me to stop auto-archiving, but that did not solve the problem. Outlook will simply dump my sent items into the deleted items file and then "on its own" permenantly delete them from the deleted items file.
The 3rd Microsoft tech suggested that I upgrade to Outlook 2007 which I did. Of course there were issues with this because hardly anything goes smoothly on the first try so we deleted all of MS Office 2003 and re-installed it, and then upgraded it all to 2007. There are still some annoying "Bill Gates" bugs like Word opening with a false error message called "type mismatch" everytime, but overall the programs were an improvement. One of the techs redid my profile to start fresh and it appears that my overall Jim_2007 Outlook profile is about 1.3 GB, but last night Outlook again dumped my sent messages and deleted them from the deleted folder!
I have been using a work around which is to try to immediately move any sent items into a personal folder and to move any others into a folder I have labled Sent Backup, but I did lose about 25 to 30 emails some with attachments again last night.
I have an amateur intuitive feeling that something got crosswired with the auto archive settings, because this seems to be happening on a 14 day interval. One would think with deleting the old programs and re-installing them the problems would have been left behind, but I really do not want to go through 3 hours of un-installing and re-intalling and upgrading again only to continue to have the same problem.
I am deeply dissappointed that 5 Microsoft techs and over 5 hours of work with them online peaking into my Dell XP computer still couldn't get to the bottom of this issue. I cannot trust Outlook and so continue to use the workarounds mentioned above as well as making sure attachments are also saved to another file on the computer. It does slow down productivity.
Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated. I believe Microsoft Outlook has a bug and their techs are not at a high enough level to know what to do.
Jim in Mundelein, IL