Case of the missing e-mails

undomiel

I've got a user on an Exchange 2007 server (SBS 200 who is having a problem with never receiving certain e-mails. Which isn't exactly true. If I check the tracking and spam logs the e-mails are received and delivered to the mailbox, but the user can't see them in either Outlook or through OWA. But if I do an export of the mailbox the e-mails are definitely sitting in his Inbox in an unread state. I've reset his views but they still are not showing up. It is only happening to this one user. I don't see a pattern in where his e-mails go missing either, as it now even happens to my e-mails from an external account. Any ideas on this would be appreciated, I'm sure I'm missing something quite obvious.

Oh and yes I checked the rules there are none configured.

Claymoore

I hate trying to track down these issues. If the message tracking log says it was delivered, the message was delivered. Views are the most common culprit, but you checked that. Other times it's a profile problem, but the message does not appear in OWA either. Best advice I can give you is to start checking event logs and turning up diagnostic logging as necessary.

Paul Boz

Is the user popping his email on an external source (iphone or other smartphone?)

undomiel

Nope, POP and IMAP isn't involved in this case, just Exchange and a BES. Wish it was POP as that was my first guess when the issue was handed off to me. By the way the BES does deliver some (but not all) of the e-mails to his Blackberry. I also did a check with mfcmapi and cleared out rules through there as well just in case something there was interfering but no such luck.

undomiel

Put in a support call to Microsoft and they came to the same unhappy solution that I already had. To make matters worse they screwed things up even more in the process. It was just going to be a simple matter of export to pst, delete mailbox, and re-import. Unfortunately Microsoft deleted the user and not just the mailbox due to me turning my back to grab a cup of water. I'm still kicking myself on that one. The guy tried to hide it too by trying to make a non-Exchange user the new user. I'm not the blind buddy.

Anyhow reimported everything from the pst and now he could receive mails fine, but the old mails were still missing. Reconnected the mailbox to a temp user, exported everything to another account which revealed the missing e-mails, exported those to pst and reimported into the user's account. Ta da, fixed! And Microsoft did not come up with the second part of that solution, that was totally home grown. So far all of my support calls to Microsoft have not played out too well. Is that the norm or the exception?

astorrs

undomiel wrote: »

Is that the norm or the exception?

Steadily moving towards the norm over the past 5-7 years or so. Grab the guys managers email from the case email and yell at him for the underhanded B.S. the guy tried after deleting the user - totally unacceptable.

DevilWAH

he dosen't have filters turned on on his mail box does he ???

phoeneous

DevilWAH wrote: »

he dosen't have filters turned on on his mail box does he ???

Doubtful, the e-mails were missing in OWA also. My guess is the BES has something to do with it, especially since its a single user issue.

Undomiel, did you use exmerge for the export?

DevilWAH

but you can have filters in the OWA as well? so if they are both on??

Not at work at moment so can't see this, but I am sure both OWA and the client can both filter folders.

Forsaken_GA

and here I thought this was going to be another web game! I was going to vote for the culprit being the sysadmin in the server room with the bulk eraser

phoeneous

DevilWAH wrote: »

but you can have filters in the OWA as well?

And how do you do that?

blargoe

Was there anything these message have in common?

blargoe

Regarding the support calls to Microsoft, I haven't needed to call Exchange support in a couple of years, but SharePoint support is absolutely atrocious these days. Historically I've had a lot of good experiences, but our company has been using our support contract mostly for SharePoint issues lately and that has colored my view of MS Support recently.

In the past, Exchange support has been excellent.

undomiel

Nope I exported to pst from Outlook, and for the export from the reconnected mailbox I used Export-MailBox. Nothing incredibly fancy there.

No filters were employed and no discernible pattern to the e-mails that were not showing up. It fortunately (and unfortunately) did the same to e-mails from my work account, so I could easily test things. Older e-mails from me were plainly visible though.

Sad to hear that Microsoft support is going down hill. So far I have yet to have a good experience with them.