I believe I know exactly what is going wrong cos it just happened to a
friend. You upgraded from an older version of outlook and did not upgrade the
pst file to th new (ANSI to Unicode) format so the pst file size limit is
still 2GB. When you reach th limit OL2003 downloads the emails into nowhere
or at least I still can't recover them. Check your pst file size. I suspect
it reads 1.9something GB. Even after moving a 200MB folder to archive and
dropping the pst file down to 1.7GB, the mails still disappear.
The first thing you should do is go to email account and find a button that
says "more settings" or "advanced", then find the place that says, "leave
mail on server for BLANK" days. Put something like 5 or 10 days. So now when
you DL the email to the void, it's stays on the server and you can still
access it while you figure out how to fix outlook. buys you some time.
I may try the Scanpst tool provided my MS but scannin thru and repairing a
2GB file will take time.
In any case, once this blows over and you have recovered all you can, make
sure you convert your pst file to the new Unicode format.
I googled how to do this but have not tried yet: Full story:
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/40961/40961.html
"When you deploy Outlook 2003, you can use the Custom Installation Wizard or
Custom Maintenance Wizard from the Office Resource Kit (ORK) to determine
what kind of .pst files users can create. On the wizards' Change Office User
Settings page, look for the PST Settings options under Microsoft Office
Outlook 2003/Miscellaneous. You can set values for "Default location for .pst
files" and "Preferred PST Mode (Unicode/ANSI)." A Unicode .pst file is the
new type supported in Outlook 2003; ANSI refers to the older type that's
limited to 2GB. Setting the Preferred PST Mode adds a string registry value
named NewPSTFormat to the
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook subkey. NewPSTFormat
can have the following values:
Prefer Unicode PST: 0 (default)
Prefer ANSI PST: 1
Enforce Unicode PST: 2
Enforce ANSI PST: 3
By using a value of 2 or 3, you can restrict all new .pst files to either
the old format or the new format."
HTH. This is such a poor design bug and I suspect many OL2003 users who
upgrade carelessly and simply sitting on time bombs. At least in the older
OL versions, an error msg would appear when you hit the pst limit and prevent
you downloading any emails.
David
