By David Gewirtz
We've got two letters from readers concerned about their email. In the first, Jen Kaye wonders if there's any way we can find her missing messages. In the second, Lillie Weeams asks why a shared mailbox doesn't seem to work right.
In both of these cases, the readers didn't give us all the information we might have needed to help out, so our answers are necessrily a bit vague.
Filled inbox made me lose 7 day of emails
Jen Kaye wrote:
So, I was away for ten days, and my inbox filled up, and once it was filled no more emails came in. Until I archived enough of the emails.
But all the emails from where it stopped (7 days ago) until today when I fixed the problem are nowhere. They aren't on the server's site. Nowhere. It's like Outlook downloaded them, but didn't put them anywhere. Any way I can recover these emails?
Hmm...Jen didn't tell us what sort of server she's using or how she's accessing her messages, so there's a lot of guesswork here.
Let's look at the basics. Either her missing messages are on the server, on her computer, or gone. The easiest place to look is on her computer.
To see if she can find them, she could do a search of her entire computer (make sure hidden and system folders are also searched) and search for files ending in .PST and .OST. If she finds some extra files, she can carefully look inside them by opening them in Outlook and perhaps the missing messages will be there.
Finding the messages on the server are a completely different game and that's dependent entirely on what the server is - a data point we weren't provided.
It sounds like she's got a quota and it's possible the server's equipped to kill all mail above the quota. To find that out, she'll have to track down her server administrator see if there's any luck to be found with that person's help.
Good luck.
Shared mail problem
Lillie Weeams of Patton Boggs LLP wrote us this note:
Recently, I received a call from a user who manages her mailbox and another shared mailbox. She received a new email in her shared mailbox and the unread mail count shows (1) in bold beside the inbox but when she clicks on the inbox, there is no email.
I closed her outlook profile and opened the shared mailbox and the email is in the inbox. We read it and closed the shared mailbox and reopened her mail profile.
There is still (1) in bold by the shared mailbox inbox. She didn't have any filters turned on and it was not marked private. This has happened twice in the last couple of months from two different people and I did some research and found this could be a bug in Outlook and never found a real reason.
I came across your Web site and thought I would ask you. Any help you can provide, I thank you.
