PST "blackout" lost crucial emails

[Guest]

Hello,

My pst file must have had some problem - probabily by reaching the 2GB size
- I've lost all e-mails I received since friday (the computer is always on).
This is very serious because it receives important business messages.

I've since auto-archive my inbox and run the scanpst.exe program. Outlook
started downloading new e-mail again and now all seems ok. Problem is all the
retrieved messages between friday and monday morning have been lost. They
have been pulled from the server but didn't appear on my Inbox. Since the
messages have been retrieved there's no other way I can get them back.

I'm running Outlook 2003 on Windows XP Professional with service pack 2.

Help anyone?

 

[Guest]

Outlook 2003 doesn't have a 2 GB limit. Can you verify that you're not
filtering your view or running rules to move email to other folders or that
they've been trapped by junk mail?

 

[Guest]

I'm not filtering and not moving to junk mail (I checked it at the time
also). It just stopped receiving email and after I cleaned up some e-mails
from the inbox it started getting e-mail again but only from that moment on.
All messages that were pulled from the server in between and not displayed
were lost. Apart from the missing e-mail I saw that something was wrong when
I tried to move some messages and it showed an error (sorry, didn't note it)
related to the PST file needing cleanup or something. After I did it started
working again.

Only after that did I procede to autoarchive and repair the file but nothing
changed.

 

[Pat Willener]

If your PST file got corrupted, and you repaired it with scanpst, then
these messages may be permanently lost. There are companies who
specialize in retrieving "lost" data from PST files, but they are
expensive, and seldom 100% successful.

If your email messages are that important to you, then you should
consider a different setup - one that keeps your messages on the server
until they are archived. Look into Exchange Server or IMAP solutions.

 

[Brian Tillman]

My pst file must have had some problem - probabily by reaching the
2GB size - I've lost all e-mails I received since friday (the
computer is always on). This is very serious because it receives
important business messages.

Are you using an ANSI or a Unicode PST? Even with Outlook 2003, ANSI PSTs
have 2 GB limits. RIght-click the root of the PST and choose Properties,
then Advanced. What is contained in the "Format" field?