Mac Forum / Applications / Outlook Express / August 2003

Good morning everyone,

I had a user running Outlook Express 5.02 on a Mac OS 9.2 machine.
This user recently left the company for a new position. They left on
amicable terms.

When someone opened that user's Outlook yesterday, all of the
messages, except for one, are gone. I checked to make sure the "View
Unread" or "View Flagged" commands were not selected, which they
were not, and then I decided to try to rebuild the database to fix this
problem.

I backed up the user's Identity folder, and then tried to do a complex
rebuild of the database. Whenever I try it, I get a Type 2 error.

Knowing the Internet Preferences file often causes Type 2 errors, I
deleted the Internet Preferences file and tried the database rebuild
again. Same result.

I then deleted the "Preferences" file from the Identity folder and tried
the database rebuild. Lo and behold, it worked ... but the messages file
went from 1.6 GB to 144k. Obviously, all of the messages were indeed
gone after doing that rebuild, so I chucked that Identities folder and
used the backup.

I then deleted the Outlook Express prefs from the System Folder's
preferences folder, and that did not fix the problem, either.

As one last attempt, I tried to compact the database, and compacting
the database did go through without any problems. However, it left me
with a 144k Messages file, which tells me all of the messages are gone.

Am I completely out of luck, or is there something else I can try? Is it
likely the user deleted all of the messages? And if so, what can I do to
recover those messages which are still located in the "Messages" file?

Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

John