We are running a windows NT 4.0 network in the office w/ Outlook 98 as an email client. Users in the office have limit on the size of thier inbox and are urged to move any items they want to keep into a PST file. These files are not affected by any maintainence and have no limits. Two users have reported random messages from the personal folders dissapearing. There does not seem to be a set age or sender for them to dissapear. Some messages date back to 1998, however messages from april could be missing. No filters are being applied, no rules are in place. Has anyone ever seen anything like this before? Feel free to ask any questions to help me clarify the problem

Few Ideas 1) Are you on Serice pack 6? (Not 6a!) if I remember correctly there were some .pst problems in the original release of the service pack 2) Check your antivirus logs it may be the case that after a signiture update a virus is found (in the missing mail messages) and then deletes them. 3) If you are storing the .pst in an NTFS compressed folder, dont! 4) What size is the .Pst file (2GB is the max) 5) Have you tried serching the users .pst / mailbox to see if you can find the mail! 6) Try to create a new .pst file and move the mail there. You may have a corrupt .pst file. Hope the above helps Super Play

We actually use service pack 5 - we are running alot of in house software and an upgrade to SP6 is not an action I can take. The NTFS folders are not compressed one of the .pst in question is 680meg I did a query to find if the messages were there somewhere and it still could not be found. Could a corrupt file delete just certain messages like this? I'm looking into the antivirus issue.

Some more info. If you are runing SP5 this should not be the issue. I only come across issues with SP6. It may be posiable that a page in the .pst has become corupt giving the impresion of missing data. Outlook 98& later comes with a tool called scanpst that you could run to check the integrity of the .pst file. Information on the 98 version can be found at: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q181/1/67.ASP Super Play