Missing e-mails/events in Outlook 2002

[Myke 0]

I have a user which has switched computer 3 times in the last couple of months due to staff reorganization. During the first switch, she noticed that most of her e-mails were not in her inbox (accounting for almost 150). However, if logged into her original PC, all of her e-mails were there. For a quick workaround, I performed a simple File and Settings Transfer Wizard, which solved the problem. I had to do the same for her last move, which is annoying and now starting to concern me.

 

I've logged in from another machine and have been monitoring her inbox. It shows all new messages, but the second that she reads them at her desk, the message disappears from the PC I'm monitoring. I've even used Outlook Web Access, but it is the same result.

 

She is now the event organizer for a department's meetings, which she set up and seemed like everything was working fine (this was before the last move). Since the last move, the events are not there. She has the invite, but cannot accept it because she is the event organizer. Because of her position, she needs to be able to edit these meetings, but cannot because they are not on her calendar.

 

I've been banging my head against my desk (literally) for the last 2 days trying to figure this out and it's driving me insane. I can only assume that she, at some point, accidently worked offline and it saved this "setting" which is causing problems. I cannot find any PST files on the 3 machines. I've also performed searches for OST files, but to no avail. Anyone have any clues on this one?

 

 

Related specs for all three machines:

Windows XP SP2

Office XP SP3

All updates installed.

[Myke 0]

After all the searching I performed in search engines and the Microsoft knowledge base, it proved to be unsuccessful. I finally opted to simply read the title of each troubleshooting article for E-mail under Outlook 2002 and found this article KB287577: E-mail messages disappear from your Ibox after you read the e-mail messages in Outlook.

 

Essentially, what happened was that the e-mail account at some point had been switched to deliver new e-mails to a local PST file instead of to the Inbox on the Exchange server. What was odd is that the PST file did not show up on the local machine. It ended up residing in C:\Documents and Settings\user_name\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Microsoft\Outlook. That folder was never there when I manually looked for it. After the change was to deliver new e-mails to the Inbox on the Exchange server, the regular Exchange mailbox opened and the Personal Folder (PST) showed itself. I had to look at the properties of the folder, copy the path, and paste the path into Windows Explorer

 

Then I had to manually transfer all of the messages within the PST file back to the Inbox/Sent/Deleted folder. The calendar was the only tricky thing (more like tedious).

 

NOTE: This will also work for Outlook 2003.