Trying to stop Outlook 2002 from deleting old mail

[Don Taylor]

Gave my mother a Dell a few years ago, Win XP, Office 2002, etc.
She uses Outlook 2002 to handle her email.

So I'm visiting and it is the usual string of things that don't work.

I've managed to figure out and fix most of them. But I can't find a
way to get Outlook to stop appearing to be deleting all mail older
than 7 days. It isn't that they are being put into archive, I've
already checked that. Actually there was no archive folder anywhere
on the entire machine when I first checked. But I did provoke it to
create an archive, just to see if it would fail and perhaps that was
the problem, nope, will make an archive if I push it into it.

But I cannot find out why it is deleting the old mail.

I've tried to do my homework first, searched help, searched microsoft,
searched old newsgroup postings, found a few things but none of them
seem to match this or give me any clue.

I am assuming there is an option set somewhere that is telling it to
delete the mail. Does anyone know where I should poke to tell it to
NEVER delete the mail? (I've already turned off the archiving on all
the individual folders so she won't be confused by mail disappearing
into there, but everything I see about it says 14 days, 7 days longer
than mail lasts before being deleted from the system.) I did see
something about "Retention Policy" but there is something in the
Microsoft web pages about there being a bug in Outlook 2002 where it
ignores Retention Policy and won't delete email even if set, but I
don't know whether that has anything to do with what I'm seeing.

Lots of free disk space, no errors, etc.

How do I get it to never delete email that she doesn't do manually.

Thank you

 

[Dave]

is she downloading mail from the server to a local folder or leaving it on
the server? if using imap and leaving the mail on the server it could be an
isp policy that is deleting it.

 

[Brian Tillman]

I've managed to figure out and fix most of them. But I can't find a
way to get Outlook to stop appearing to be deleting all mail older
than 7 days. It isn't that they are being put into archive, I've
already checked that. Actually there was no archive folder anywhere
on the entire machine when I first checked. But I did provoke it to
create an archive, just to see if it would fail and perhaps that was
the problem, nope, will make an archive if I push it into it.

But I cannot find out why it is deleting the old mail.

Perhaps it's not deleteing it. What View is she using?

 

[Don Taylor]

is she downloading mail from the server to a local folder or leaving it on
the server? if using imap and leaving the mail on the server it could be an
isp policy that is deleting it.

Using Send/Receive and downloading it from the server to her local folder,
I believe.

 

[Don Taylor]

Perhaps it's not deleteing it. What View is she using?

Now I'm not even down there to be able to put my hands on it to tell.
But I did see when I would click on say the inbox and look at the list
of mail sitting there I would see the items sorted by date. There would
be items back exactly 6 days and the stuff from the 7th day was gone.
The next day there were still 6 days of stuff with the now new 7th day
messages again gone. And in the third pane was the selected email.

So how can it not be deleting them? I'd be happy to find a solution.
(I'd really prefer this to not turn into archiving because then I have
to explain archiving to my mother and how to get them back out of the
archive when she wants them. Much more preferable would be that all
mail must be dealt with manually by her)

Even more searching and I did find one item on the Microsoft pages
"OL2002: E-Mail Retention Policies Do Not Work After You Apply Them"
which sounds like it might be related but that was saying that it
wouldn't delete items that supposedly should be deleted rather than
the other way round.

Thanks for any assistance

Don't EVER buy your mother a computer and expect it to work.
They just don't build hardware or software up to that task yet.

 

[Brian Tillman]

So how can it not be deleting them?

I'm speculating that you have the "Last Seven Days" view set. Click
View>Arrange By>Current View>Messages.

 

[Don Taylor]

I'm speculating that you have the "Last Seven Days" view set. Click
View>Arrange By>Current View>Messages.

You were exactly on target with your analysis.

Via email I was able to negotiate my mother through the process
of un-checking "Last Seven Days" and she discovered that she has
several years of old mail messages sitting there, the ones that
she wasn't successful in doing something with before they vanished.

Thank you, I owe you a cookie.

And, that has to be one of the least obvious "features" that I've
run across thus far. Didn't seem to be any hint, no matter how
many times I dug through the help system, no matter how many times
I ran google searches, no matter how many times I ran microsoft
web page searches, asked several times in the XP general group,
etc. Nobody recognized this "feature."

 

[Brian Tillman]

You were exactly on target with your analysis.

Yippee!