Exchange/outlook missing email mystery

[MobileTechie]

Hi

One of my clients uses SBS 2008 running Exchange for mail. They have domain PCs in their office and some PCs at home. The ones at home also link into Exchange via RPC over HTTP and are, obviously, in sync mailbox-wise with the office PCs.

One office PC broke so they used a home laptop. This wasnt added the domain as it's running XP Home. But outlook was pointed to their exchange mailbox and some folders mapped so they could use it. All was fine.

However they tell me that since getting home and firing up the PC there, the mailboxes of that user account are empty. Deleted Items and a couple of user created folders are there but in, sent and out are all empty. If I send new mail it does appear in the inbox. So it seems that by allowing this laptop to pull email from exchange, it has wiped their mailbox effectively. Is this possible? I've not seen it before. Any info on this?

Thx

 

[OfficeTechs]

whilst i would never say its not possible in around 10 years of being around Exchange environments I have never seen this.

Check their Send/Receive settings in Outlook or better still create a new mail profile on the machine and reconnect to the mailbox, it should pull the mail back down. Either that or the user has done something stupid and actually deleted mails and folders from the server mailbox.

 

[MobileTechie]

Hi mate

Actually looking at it the Sent items are there so only Inbox and some user ones are gone.

I've looked at the box via RWW and it's also empty so it's gone from Exchange too. I already tried the new profile and same news.

Is there anything to do with using a none domain laptop that could possibly cause this? I cannot think of anything.

 

[MobileTechie]

I think I've sort of got to the bottom of it.

On the ex-home laptop, Outlook was set to deliver all messages not to the Username - Exchange mailbox but to Personal Mailbox and no OST file was created. Not sure why but it looks that this causes Outlook to pull the mail folders down from Exchange and populate this PST file instead of an OST. Then when it syncs Outlook probably looks at its Inbox, sees that it's empty and this is then echoed in Exchange thus effetively wiping that box. Something like that anyway.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Ahh you found what I was going to suggest.....since they had an XP Homeless computer setup...I figured Outlook was botched in setup too..and set to deliver to personal folders instead of pointing to the users mailbox only. Now you can copy the PST to a safe spot, delete the profile in Outlook, recreate a fresh new profile in Outlook, setup..(well..first...let me back up a bit...do an upgrade of XP Homeless to Pro..do it right, join the domain, you won't lose data on a home to pro upgrade). Now after joining the domain, copy essential user data from the users old local profile to the new domain profile, setup Outlook properly, and then import all the mail from the PST to the users mailbox.