Outlook 2003 deleting inbox emails

[james.schlup.33]

I am having some wierd issues on one of the email accounts for a customer I manage. Recently his exchange account when accessed in outlook 2003 will start deleting all email messages in the inbox. I had to create another folder and have all message routed to that on to save all of his incoming emails. I have already scanned for viruses using AVG. None were found. I have disabled all redirect rules except for the ont to save the emails. Whats most wierd is that it will only delete email while being accessed by Outlook on any computer. If accessed through web app or by phone will not remove any emails. So i believe it has something to do with settings that the user changed under thier outlook account.

This user does tend to play with alot of settings, so i was wondering if anyone knows of settings in outlook that could cause such behavior. I myself do not really use outlook that much, tend to use phone or web app as those are always readily available for me so i am having to do alot of searching through settings and i have yet been unable to find documentation on outlook. Any help would be much appreciated.

[JorgeM]

It sounds like a POP3 configuration scenario where you configure a POP3 client to delete messages from the server when downloading them to the client.

If this user has Outlook connected to Exchange, the messages would be delivered to the inbox. If this user had another client using POP3, that client may be download the messages and deleting them from the inbox.

[james.schlup.33]

I checked those settings and they were ok. Also ran a query on the server looking for emails on the account and all the emails are still on server just not viewable after outlook had been opened, also to clarify the emails were not opened just outlook was opened for a period of time and the messages disappeared, not able to recognise they are there on any other email application.

[Reverend Jim]

Are there any rules being applied by Outlook that might be automatically moving the messages to other folders? Possibly junk mail filters?

[james.schlup.33]

Yes thank you it was rules settings. The user had rules setup to move items out of inbox into a .pst file on the desktop then delete them from so had a recent computer upgrade so the .pst file did not exist. So outlook was moving these files to literally nowhere, I'm surprised it didn't throw a "cannot find dest file error" that would have been very helpful.