By David Gewirtz
OutlookPower reader Mike Becker has one of the stranger questions we've gotten here at OutlookPower. Since this is a first, I thought I'd share:
I'm using Office Microsoft Outlook 2007 SP2 (MSO) and have had an issue now raise its head twice in the last 6 months, and I'm absolutely stumped in finding an answer. I'm no expert, but certainly not a newbie either.
I have sent an email to a person, and they reply to me. On 2 different occasions upon receiving a reply from 2 different people, I see the Unread message in my Inbox column and can read who it's from, time received, and approximately the first sentence of the reply that the person typed.
But when I click on the message to read the entire contents, of course the Message status changes from Unread to Read, and in the preview pane (and/or if I completely open the message), ALL of the text that the person typed when replying is gone/disappears. Any text that I had sent to him in the original email remains within his reply. And to top it off, in the Inbox column after clicking on the message, the text that I had previously been able to read (although only approximately a sentence) has also disappeared.
I tried to forward the email to myself in hopes it would reappear, no luck. I did a Control-A and copied everything and pasted into a new email message, but no luck.
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated as I hate to ask the person replying to reply again with the same response as they'd already typed (not professional at all).
It took me a few reads through to figure out that he seems to have message text disappearing. Quite obviously, that's not supposed to happen. I don't have an answer, but I have some diagnostic suggestions.
First, Mike didn't tell us whether he was viewing the message in HTML or plain text. One thing to do would be to find out if all the messages were in the same format.
Another think he didn't tell us was whether there's any security on the messages. By checking the Message Options, it's possible to find out if there's any security attached to the messages that are messed up.
Another idea is to look at the actual source of the message. Use the View Source option under Other Actions. Look inside the dump and see if there's more there than is being displayed. There could be some sort of corruption in the message source that's keeping the renderer from displaying it.
Under Other Actions is also a View in Browser option. I'd try that, too, to see if a browser displays more of the message than Outlook does. This is an interesting test, because Outlook 2007 renders messages using the Word engine, and your browser (especially if you use Firefox) has a completely different rendering system.
There also might be a clue in learning what email clients were used to send the problem messages. If all were sent by one client, then you know your answer. He could either ask his correspondents, or he could dig through the full headers to see if he can find anything that stands out.
Mike is obviously experiencing some sort of incompatibility and like a detective hunting for a serial killer, Mike has to find some commonality between the messages before he can solve the crime.
