I get hundreds of customer e-mails with Outlook, and Outlook 2003 deleted all of my inbox items, because it was at its Maximum Capacity. No warning message, nothing! It just downloaded everything, and completely garbled it into nothing!!! I really need someone to help me, isn’t there a backup file or something where these items go? It certainly wasn’t in my Deleted Items folder. I even cleaned up Outlook to clear some space. I hate microsoft. Someone help
Don’t hate MS for poor system security/backup strategy.
If you don’t want to lose it you should back it up. Don’t use the inbox for general storage, it is the most vulnerable to corruption. My inbox has 0 emails in it, once dealt with they are moved to a more appropriate folder.
You may be able to recover some of the data. First find where Outlook stores the database files .PST (I think, I don’t use Outlook) and you will probably find that there are two inbox’s with slightly differing names (if it is anything like OE).
Create a new Outlook folder and select File Import and there should be some way to import an email database (.PST file, as I said I’m not an Outlok user, so I can’t be of more help). Using the browse… function select the old (deleted) inbox.
I hope that gets you on your way and having learnt a valuable lesson, back it up or lose it, you shouldn’t experience this problem again.
superscrewup, why did you post here in avast forum?
Do you use avast?
Maybe the Moderators could move this into General board.
If you had a backup… it will be easier…
Can you search your computer for *.dbx files and see what you get?
Yeah, he needs to find his old PST file. If he didn’t make any archive file or backup of his original PST file, it could be a problem.
Btw, I’ve never heard that Outlook 2003 erases e-mails withouy any notification warnings. That’s absolutely not true. And, what’s your Maximum capacity ? It’s up to you how many e-mails you’ll store in your Inbox. If your PST file is located on your local HD, your inbox size is limited just by your HD capacity, nothing else. On the other hand, if your PST file location is somewhere on the server, then your Inbox size is limited just by your available space on the server.
I installed MS Office 2003 for one of the largest North America’s steel company. More than 40 people in offices uses Outlook 2003. They receive more than 100 e-mails each day… and best of all, they keep those e-mails… Also, they send same amount of e-mails from their computer. They keep all those sent and deleted items. Their PST files are located on the server, under each user’s personal folder. If Outlook 2003 erases those e-mails by itself, I’m sure those people would scream like crazy… well, it could be that mailbox size is limited by some number that represents physical size of PST file, but still I don’t believe Outlook would erase anything before it notifies the user or “ask” him what he wants to do if mailbox ran out of free space…
Microsoft doesn’t have to do anything with this, so I wouldn’t blame Microsoft !
Are you sure, you didn’t put checkmark under SHOW UNREAD E-mails ONLY ?
No matter what email client you're using, why not take a look at your mail files now, and save or export some older messages if your mailboxes are getting unwieldy? Email problems like this are always easier to prevent than to recover from!
I will never understand why people keep all those hundreds and hundreds of messages in their inbox. If some message is very important to you, why not save it as e-mail somewhere on your hard drive, and that way, you’ll aslo have backup. Exporting of PST is always welcome, but some people still think that inbox is bottomless hole… like always, we should be more careful about everything, not just think that computers will do everything for us…
Right to the point inthewildteam… you’re completely right…
But, as Technical already said:
superscrewup, why did you post here in avast forum?
Do you use avast?
I really don’t see a reason for posting this in these forums. It should be somewhere in Microsoft newsgroups, Outlook/Office 2003 related forums… or at least in avast! Off-Topic forums… His question totaly doesn’t have anything to do with avast!
Yeah, running business and not making backups… doesn’t sound too professional to me…
No, really… everyone should make backups on regular basis, especially people who runs some business… there is too much to loose if we are not careful enough.
I deleted 650,000 e-mails from my outlook recently, old stuff. I run an online business, the losses weren't that bad, but for those of you who think Microsoft has your back, just wait until you have something important like this happen to you.
Microsoft can’t be blamed for that. They can not even image what will million of different users all around the world, do with their products. They give you help files, support, books, whatever, but they can not predict millions of different situations. You admited yourself that you most likely made a mistake. See here:
Quote by superscrewup:
The issue here is, so many folders are in my Outlook, that i ran out of PST Space, most likely because i converted from Outlook 2000 to Outlook 2003, and I failed to convert to the Personal Folders instead of 2000 Format, which limited my PST file.
And no one said anything about “forum Junky”. At least I can not find it in anyone’s reply, no matter how hard I was searching.
Quote by superscrewup:
By the way, im not a forum junky, i just thought someone nice could help me out. I have a life, i don't spend it in here.
You are saying that we don’t have a life ? We all also have a life, but we are trying to be helpful in these forums… security, avast!, antivirus, firewall related. There are some Outlook and other Microsoft related, very helpful forums out there. So, maybe you should ask them first. To be true, that’s their area. If you paid for product (Outlook 2003) you should know that they have 24/7 phone support. Of course, they will ask you for your licence number (which I’m, sure you must have 'cause you said yourself that you run some business), but at least you’ll get help.
And don’t think someone tried to make fun of you. We are very serious forum and we like to help. It was just unbelievable that someone who runs business and depend on so many e-mails, didn’t do backup… now it’s much clearer, but after all, I wouldn’t call it superscrewup
We had few members in these forums who gave themselfves nicknames just because of some particular temporary problem they had at that point. Even if we solved it and helped that person, we never heard from him again… that’s sad…
But I still don’t understand why you had to erase your previous post ? I didn’t make up all those quotes myself. Everyone in these forums knows that I am not a liar… maybe I’m just a frog, but I don’t lie ;D ;D ;D
What are you talking about ? Who is acting at all ? I never said anything about how long he needs to respond to our mails… read previous posts and replies and you’ll see that Technical and DavidR mentioned about that issue, not me…
Better check those facts before make any conclusions !
