Evening All

Had a hellish day with Outlook today. Had to restart my PC because a piece of research software we use had to be restarted. Upon restarting I could not get into Outlook. The message I got was the inbox needed to be repaired and to run scanpst.exe, needless to say scanpst.exe did not work. I had read scanpst.exe wouldn't work if the file was too big so I compacted the mailbox as suggested, I have/had some 15,000 sent items, and tried again....didnt work. Eventually I discovered this thread http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/o... and the post by 'Simon Jones' seemed to make sense and was easy to do...I tried it and no problems. I deleted the existing account as suggested, set up the new one (called Outlook1) with exactly the same details and it worked. However I noticed the auto fill on sending an email didnt have any addresses saved so I deleted this account and reset using the same name as before (Outlook) and voila the auto fill is working again. The only change I noticed in doing this was the address went from -00000001.pst to -00000002.pst.

So all was well, got mail to send again but then received a call from a client who I had emailed only Friday last...I say 'just a second whilst I go back to the email' and then discover the sent items folder is empty!!!!

I use Outlook 2007, with IMAP set up as also use an iPhone and accounts are synced. Any ideas how I might get the sent items back or are they gone forever?

Thanks in advance

Do you have web access to your email account? If so, are the sent items visible?

Spantney - thanks for the detailed reply. I have a friend who is going to look at it for me tomorrow. He's an IT Pro, 20+ years working in Security etc and now a VM Ware specialist. He has told me not to use Outlook now until he looks at it, I found a 3.6GB .ost file on the C drive and he got me save a copy of that into a seperate folder so it doesnt get overwritten. I am hoping it is the file we need and an convert it .pst if thats what is needed and 'sent items' return.

Bikerjon - I have logged into the wen accesss for the account and only imap messages are shown in the sent items on there.

lestag - I have ben advised to leave Outlok as it is for now so nothing else is overwritten.

Thanks for the replies fellas, much appreciated. Will lt yo uknow if it can be rescued.

Yes that is how the account is set up SMTP as outgoing!

When I log into the web account its shows 1.41GB/1.95GB for the emails held there which is basically the inbox with just over 6,000 emails in it. Could that mean there is a chance the 3.6GB .ost file in the C-drive will include the sent items with 15,000 to 16,000......using basic man maths its 3 times the size.

I have everything crossed the sent items are in there.....lesson learnt either way. Back these up in the same way as all other files!!!

That's not a bug. AFAIK, that has always been the default action with Outlook when using IMAP / POP3 mailboxes.

I remember having to create a rule to move all my sent items to... sent items on the server, as Outlook always placed them in the local pst file.

OP - do you have an archive.pst on your PC anywhere?

^^ this suggests that archive ran - which has probably archived everything to archive.pst.

My bad - confusing 2003 & 2007.

Last I remember the OST file is for a mailbox connected to and exchange server, not an IMAP or POP3 sever.

If you right click on the mailbox for your imap account and select properties (or data file properties) and advanced. It will tell you what PST file contains the IMAP stuff.

Sorry to hear that you are still having trouble mate. Unfortunately OST files can become unstable when they get too big and whilst it isn't the worst I've heard of, 3.6Gb for an OST is on the larger side of life.

There are OST to PST converters available however most if not all you would have to pay for. I downloaded one on free trial a while ago and although it converted the file it heavily restricted what I was able to import from it until I bought a full license (which I didn't do!). If your sent items are very important maybe it would be worth downloading something like this;

http://www.systoolsgroup.com/ost-recovery.html

try it on trial to make sure it can recover and then maybe purchase a license? Sorry I can't really be of more help.

Cheers,

Tony

Bit confused why you're looking at OST repair tools when the account seems to be IMAP? Or is it Exchange afterall? There's some fundamental differences between the two when it comes to this sort of stuff!