For some reason last night I lost about seven months of sent e-mails. When I went to click on the sent folder as any other time, there was a hang up. I just figured it was just like any other hang up and that I would close the program and it would restart and be okay. When I restarted Outlook, I found that my sent messages started at February instead of just yesterday. This happened once in the past and I just restarted Outlook or did a system restart, don't remember which, and they came back. What is really strange is that I can do a search using the Find feature in Outlook and it will pull up around 20 or so e-mails scattered over the last few months. If I go to file>settings>properties while highlighting the Sent folder in Outlook, it will show the directory where all of the e-mails are stored. Well, it shows the number of e-mails in my sent folder but there sure weren't that many in that directory. I dont' know what happened to those lost messages but I would now like to start archiving. I am able to save one at a time but how do I save multiple e-mails or folders all at once for archiving? If I highlight several e-mails, Save As is not available but is available if I want to save just one and it does allow me to save just one. If I choose export, I get this message, An error occured while initializing MAPI. What is going on with the lost e-mails and how do I archive multiple messages at once? Thanks.

:eek: A couple of months ago I deleted all my old e-mails, after moving a few important ones. There were like 2000 of them. Water under the bridge---glad they're gone.

Do you know if Outlook has a maximum limit of storage that I may have exceeded?

You have very probably a bad sector in your mailfile. Do an export to file as found in the file | Import and export-menu. Choose export to file. You'll get a window with different filetypes. Choose "personal Folder file" and follow the wizard from there.

The outlook will go through your file and try to fix any problems. When you are done import the file you have made into outlook again. This may take a very long time, and you computer may lock up, in an error is found.

There is even a compagny who has made a outlook repair tool

http://www.officerecovery.com/outlook/

I have not tried it though.

James,

I was just going through my old messages and came across the e-mail you sent asking me to check this thread. Somehow I missed it when you sent it. Did you ever recover your e-mails?

Wow, six months later! Hahaha! No, I never got them back as they were. But, what is strange is that if I do a search in Outlook for with a date range some of them will appear in that search.

Late reply but if you where using Outlook 2000 it had a limit of 2GB for its file and a bug that would allow you to exceed the 2G. At some point suddenly you'd run into problems and then you could recover whatever was before the 2GB.

In my email system (not outlook) crashes will cause it to lose data. It has no recovery :(. But what I do. that may help you in future, is I identified which file did which in the email system, and their backup/temp files. When a crash happens, before you ever start up the program (that may cause things to get worse and eliminate backup and temp files) I would look for the backup/temp files and try to restore or patch it (and also the found files from the system disk check).

Complex and time consuming I know, but unless you can find recovery programs through google, try to run the suggested recovery through outlook (I don't know what it will do top the backup and temp files) or backup regularly, that is all you can do. Still, when you know how to do it you can copy the backup and temp files to safety before running outlook (just in case).


Thanks

Wayne.