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The original was posted on /r/sysadmin by /u/ChickenPicture on 2024-01-22 20:47:49+00:00.
Got a weird problem that I have seen pop up in multiple environments across the years on occasion. The gist is this:
- User on corp network sends a regular old email.
- For various reasons, Outlook farts and says "durr I ain't got not connection to da mail server lol" and sticks the message in the outbox.
- The user says WTF, closes Outlook and/or reboots.
- User re-opens Outlook, message is gone from outbox and never hit the Exchange server, all attempts to trace end with nothing to show.
This recently happened to someone higher up in my company with their notes for a meeting the next morning, which obviously did not go over super well, and at the very least I need to come up with a procedure for the helpdesk to assist recovering the message when this happens, but I'd really like to know what is going on when this happens.
It can't be as simple as Outlook firing a message off into nothing, can it? Why would it do that?
So far my procedure is, don't close outlook, don't reboot, copy the message out of the outbox, but I need something a bit more robust that ideally could recover these phantom emails after Outlook was restarted.
Any assistance or input is appreciated!