Outlook not displaying all imap emails

[Yann Shukor]

Hi

A client of mine is experiencing a strange phenomenon in Outlook 2013 32bit (Windows 7 64bits)

Yesterday he was sorting his emails and moved a few into sub (/sub/sub/...) folders

This morning he tried to access one of these emails, in it's present sub folder, and just as Outlook had finished displaying the contents of this folder, the sought email disappeared before his very eyes ! This isn't the first time he experiences such a behaviour by Outlook

I connected up to his account from my PC using Thunderbird and when I view the contents of the folder mentioned above I see its contents, missing email included

We checked other folders and realized that Outlook, compared with Thunderbird, isn't displaying the entire contents of these folders

I tried to check whether there were any filters enabled in the View menu but couldn't find any (maybe this is configured elsewhere ?)

I copied the missing email to his Inbox and asked him to transfer it back to the desired sub folder again : and now he sees it in its new destination (I however see two copies of it under Thunderbird)

Incidentally the Synchronization error folder contains over fifty thousand errors; should we heed the high quantity of these errors or ignore them ?

Any ideas on what could be causing this Outlook issue ?

Two weeks ago I split his OST file, by archiving part of it to a PST, because the file had reached 28 GB
The created archive is 10 GB in size, while the OST file has now shrunk to 5 GB. I can't explain what happened to the missing difference (13 GB)

thanks
yann

PS
Why does the Office setup install Office in 32bit mode by default (on 64bit systems) ?

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Incidentally the Synchronization error folder contains over fifty thousand errors; should we heed the high quantity of these errors or ignore them ?

look at the ones from the last couple of days and see what the errors are - then delete all of them. The older ones are unlikely to be of use - i wouldn't go back more than a couple of days and if the problem still exists, more will be generated. In many cases, the problem is with the deleted items/trash folder or junk folder - the server clears out old messages in those folders but outlook chokes on removing them for some reason. Splitting the data file could also trigger these sync errors.

I'm assuming the sync slider is set to full, so the missing mail isn't on the server because it's older... if there are no folders labeled 'this computer only' in the data file or you back up their contents, you can rename the ost file and let outlook resync to see if the message sync back down.

I can't explain what happened to the missing difference (13 GB)

It was deleted messages that outlook hadn't removed by compacting yet. When you delete something, outlook removes it from the index but leaves the message blob behind - removing it only when the "white space" these blobs use reaches 20% and the computer is idle. When the file is huge, it seems ot struggler with compacting - I've seen a lot of data files that were closer to 50% white space.

 

[Yann Shukor]

Thanks Diane
When we split the OST file we had Outlook recreate the OST file by downloading the data again.
Like I said, when configured to access her account, Thunderbird displays the correct contents of all her folders

 

[Diane Poremsky]

I'm not sure what is going on. If no views are set and the message is not marked for deletion (use the imap view to show all), the message should be in Outlook.

 

[Yann Shukor]

quite

 

[bernicestockstill]

Interesting, I have never meat such case