Empty TO Field in Sent Items Folder

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I upgraded my machines from office 2000 to office 2003 sp1. Some users are
experiencing a problem where when they send an email the copy in the sent
items shows a blank TO field. I have confirmed the emails are getting
received by the contacts that were in the TO field when it was sent.
 
My company has also upgraded to Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2003 SP1. The
blank "TO:" field is becoming quite a problem for some users. If you look at
the mail headers for the email, they are correct - so it must be the way
outlook 2003 stores the email in the "sent" folder and not the email itself.

We also run a 3rd party application that sends email through outlook. I find
that for some users, more than 95% of the emails have no "TO:" field. For
regular emails, it is way less often.

I had problem users log into a computer with Outlook 2000 installed and the
emails still appear the same way. This indicates that the problem emails
arent simply being displayed incorrectly, but they are being stored in
Exchange in the same way.

Are other users with this same problem running any 3rd party applications
that generate emails or is this issue simply with sending any emails? I have
also found that when one of my users sends to a particular domain, this
problem almost always happens. How is it possible the email is affected by
which domain it is being sent to?

I look forward to input from other users.

Steve
 
We are having the same problem - an empty "to field" in the sent
folder. I found this microsoft article that addresses a very similar
problem. But according to the article this problem only occurs in
outlook 2002.

We have had this problem with outlook 2003. The emails in question, in
our situtation, were created in an excel macro using mapi. Of 39 emails
we sent 22 had empty "to fields" and 17 had an address in the "to
field."

the microsoft article : http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=328281

Is there a way to view the exchange server log and determine where the
emails were sent ? We have asked the server administrator to find these
email logs - but so far we have not got a response.
 
We are having the same problem - an empty "to field" in the sent
folder. I found this microsoft article that addresses a very similar
problem. But according to the article this problem only occurs in
outlook 2002.

We have had this problem with outlook 2003. The emails in question, in
our situtation, were created in an excel macro using mapi. Of 39 emails
we sent 22 had empty "to fields" and 17 had an address in the "to
field."

the microsoft article : http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=328281

Is there a way to view the exchange server log and determine where the
emails were sent ? We have asked the server administrator to find these
email logs - but so far we have not got a response.
 
I just wanted to update everyone with some details of this problem.

In my case, the messages always arrive at their intended destination. This
simply seems to be an issue with the "sent items" folder and not mail
delivery itself. I had the users who run outlook 2003 sp1 to logon to a
machine with office 2000. The to: field is still missing on those emails. It
looks as though once outlook 2003 stores the send mail incorectly, it is
permanent.

When you look at the mail headers of the mail message, you can see the
recipients in the header. If you compare the headers from a message that
retained the "to:" field and one that didn't - they both look the same. It
simply seems to be an issue of outlook 2003 writing some information
incorrectly for each email. It is not a read issue on the email because
outlook 2000 doesn't display the to: header either.

I'm hoping microsoft releases a fix for this issue because this is affecting
thousands of emails per day for my company alone. It may seem like a small
bug, but will be disasterous when trying to dig through months of past emails
to find the one you need.

Steve
 
Do any of you that are having this problem have anti-virus software
scanning outgoing messages on the client? If so, could you try turning off
that scanning and see if it affects anything? We've been seeing lots of
weird consequences of A/V software trying to integrate with Outlook. While
I've not seen this in particular, I wonder if might be related.
 
I have the same issue with OL2003. I am running symantec corp ed v9.

Workaround, this is a hassle but if you absolutly need the address to show,
open the item in the sent items then right click on the TO field (where the
address should be) then select properties. This brings up the the send item's
address properties, you'll notice just the display name is mucked up, fix it
and hit OK, the address will now show.

It can take a few tries to right click in the right spot, generally you need
to hit the spot just below the first letter in the FROM address.
 
We have the same problem with some of our users with OL2003. We use e-trust
antivirus v7.1 from CA.

In our environment, it seems that the emails (where the to field is blank)
are to recipients served by the same Exchange server as the sender, but I
know of at least one time when a sender simply keyed an e-mail address in the
to field (where the recipient was not on the Exchange server or in a contact
list) and the to field showed blank in the sent items. That caused a problem
when the sender wanted to send a follow-up e-mail and could not find the
email address that the original message was sent to.

The workaround will help, but a fix would be better.
 
We are also experiencing this problem (details below).

We upgraded from Office 2003 Professional (no patches) to Office 2003 SP1
including all post-SP1 hotifxes over this weekend. This problem only started
appearing yesterday (Monday), which means that this is a serious bug within
one of the Office 2003 updates released. For your information, we are also
running Windows XP SP2 with all the latest updates on the desktop, and
Windows 2003 with Exchange 2003 SP1 on the server, with no Exchange or
Outlook addins.

Per Jeff Stephenson's suggestion, I disabled the Anti-virus software
(Symantec) from scanning MS Exchange on the client. Unfortunately however,
this did not fix the problem.

The problem is as follows:
Only on certain email address domains (ie: emails sent to any address within
that domain), when you send an email to that address, the To: field is blank
when you view the sent email in the Outlook 2003 Sent Items List and open the
Sent email for viewing. However, this does not affect the email's delivery -
only it's view in Outlook - we have confirmed with the recipients that the
emails are in fact being received.

I have noticed the following:

1. If you send an email to multiple e-mail domains in the To: field, having
this one problematic email address will cause the entire To: field to be
empty. However, on this same email when multiple cc: addresses are entered,
again with the problematic email address entered, the other cc: email
addresses will show, however the problematic one will not.
2. If you perform a "reply-to-all" on this sent email, the email addresseses
appear in the To: field.
3. One googled message thread mentioned that deleting the NK2 file
temporarily fixed this problem.

Any help or advise would be appreciated. As you can see from the microsoft
newsgroups and google searches, this appears to be a serious bug with is
affecting a large number of Microsoft Outlook installations.
 
Paul, did you manage to find a solution to your problem? I have tha same
problem and can't find a solution.

Regards,

Matthew Reed.
 
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