One of the recent requests from a user stated that all his mail without even visiting Inbox went right into … Deleted Items folder. No problem – just find the rule which does that and remove or fix it.
Simple as “one, two, three, doesn’t work”. Yep, after I had deleted all the rules the Inbox still lacked the mail.
Now what? Moving mailbox to another location? Probably that would help, probably not, but it is not a solution, actually (neither was the workaround we have found).
Even Google Almighty wasn’t able to find the solution (I found it later, when I new what to look for), so we went to our final resort: Microsoft Premier Support (yep, we didn’t want to breed a new variety of users: those who read their email in deleted items and store business critical documents in the recycled bin). The workaround was quite simple: set AutomateProcessing for the mailbox into AutoUpdate. After doing that:
Get-Mailbox | Set-CalendarProcessing -AutomateProcessing AutoUpdate
everything went back to normal. And you know what? I’m fine with it, even it wasn’t me, who found the solution =)
I’ve had one more case recently: an employee reported that his outlook wouldn’t search any item for the last three weeks or so. Rebuilding indices didn’t help and moreover he was not using cached outlook mode. Well, while my search seemed to be ok, I needed to reproduce the problem somehow, so I went nuts and removed cached mode too. Bingo! My search results were restricted by the period from the same three-weeks-ago and to the beginning of time. No results from yesterday or last week. Considering the fact that mailboxes, both the employee’s and mine were in the same storage group I decided that it was the server index who was responsible for that tragedy (do you know where is each your mail at the moment, by the way?). 