Disappearing emails exchange 2007

Question

Happening to 2 reported users. It appears a new mailbox solved the 1st persons issue.

Symptoms:

Email arrives on phone (via activesync) notices it then disappears a few seconds later. In testing, this only happens when outlook is open.

Outlook closed: Email arrives on phone and webmail and remains there as normal.

Outlook opened: Email arrives and shows up on webmail and phone but does not appear in outlook. Soon thereafter email is gone from webmail and phone. This does not happen to all emails. Tested from gmail, yahoo, and internal. So far internal emails don’t seem to be affected but not positive.

Notes: - No outlook rules seen - Mail Delivery has is set to OST and not PST as NOT ALL new emails disappear - This is a legacy mailbox (Exchange 2003) - No known antivirus activity @ email servers - Spam soap lets the email thru normally and is why it arrives at exchange server ok - No sign of ESET client activity at user (Nothing in logs)

Answer 1

Deleteing the mailbox and creating a new one seems like a pretty drastic measure to resolve this kind of problem. If the problem only occurs when Outlook is open then that tells me that Outlook is the culprit, not the mailbox. I would suggest starting outlook from Run using the following:

outlook.exe /cleanrules

This will remove (clean) all server and client side rules. There may be a rule that's become corrupted/hidden that's causing the problem. If so, this should resolve it.

Answer 2

I know this is an older post, but I have had this issue before.

When the phone syncs with the server it sees the email, but outlook is naturally slower to sync than phones (I have no idea why, they just do). When the outlook client sees a new email come in it puts that email in the default folder group (Personal folders, Mailbox, Archive, etc). This can be changed in outlook (2003) by selecting tools> email accounts> view/change accounts> then there is a drop down labeled "deliver email to the following location:" This will have all the folder groups listed.

Make sure to set the default to the "Mailbox - User" folder group. This is the server mailbox, any other option will remove the emails from the server and move them to the computer locally, thus rendering all of Exchange recovery tools useless on that mailbox.

What happens now:

1. email is received at server.

2. phone syncs with server.

3. outlook syncs with server.

4. outlook moves email from server to default folder (probably set to a "Personal Folder" group)

5. Phone syncs back with server which has lost the email due to it being moved to the computer running outlook client.

Answer 3

Is it possible that a client-side spam filter that runs only within Outlook that is molesting these e-mails? Check your Junk Mail settings to make sure.