Email messages disappear from your Inbox in Outlook 2002 and 2003

Applies to: MS Outlook 2002 and 2003

If you are using Microsoft Outlook 2002 or Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, you might have come across a situation when your email messages disappeared from your Inbox. In many cases, this behavior occurs only after you have gone through the emails. Disappearing emails can leave you in havoc and so it becomes important to know the reason that is causing emails to disappear. There are two possible causes for this behavior of Outlook 2002 and 2003:

• You have a filter that applies to display only unread messages, or
• You are looking for the email at the MS Exchange mailbox when you have an instance of Outlook running that has delivery set to PST file

In Outlook 2002

1. Go to View menu, point to Current View and then click Customize Current View.
2. In the View Summary dialog box, click Filter

In Outlook 2003

1. Go to View menu, point to Arrange By, point to Current View and then click Customize Current View.
2. In the Customize View dialog box, click Filter

In the Filter dialogue box, click Clear All and then click OK twice

In order to deal with such issues, you can use one of the following methods. Following methods can help you resolve this situation:

Method 1:

If you doubt a filter is applied to your display that only shows you the unread messages then follow the steps below to remove all the filters:

This method allows you to remove all the filters that were previously applied to your message display settings.

Method 2:

In both the Exchange Server and Personal Folders (PST), services are included to your profile to ensure that the default delivery location for new email is set to your Exchange Server mailbox. Else, emails move from Exchange Inbox to Personal Folders Inbox. To fix this problem, perform the steps given below:

1. On the Tools menu, click Email Accounts
2. Click View or Change existing email accounts and then click Next
3. Verify that the Deliver new email to the following location option is set to your mailbox and then click Finish.
4. Now Restart Outlook

After making the Exchange mailbox the default delivery location for the incoming emails, you can move email from the Personal Folders (PST) Inbox back to the Exchange Inbox.

PST file repair, this works as a boon for Outlook users and administrators. Recover emails and other items from corrupt, damaged and inaccessible PST files. Outlook data files which become inaccessible due to 2GB file limitation is also repaired successfully with Kernel for Outlook PST Repair software.