I have a user whose Sent Items folder is empty, in their Archive folder.. Is there a way this could have happened other than the user accidentally deleting it?
3 Answers
It could happen if he didnt select the sent items to be archived.
Outlook 2003
- On the original mailbox, right-click on their Sent Items folder
- Go to Properties
- Click on the Auto Archive tab
- Make sure their settings are comparable to what you'd expect to see in the Archived PST
8 years on, evidently this problem has not gone away, as I've just been hit by it on a machine using Outlook 2013.
I was able to fix the problem using MFCMAPI. This tool is on GitHub, and there's a good article here showing how to set the necessary attributes. Once I ran MFCMAPI, I could see that the Sent Items folder was actually present in the archive, just not visible in Outlook. Using the steps in the linked article, I was able to restore the proper visibility.
In my case, Sent Items didn't have the PR_ATTR_HIDDEN attribute initially, but after following the steps to add PR_ATTR_HIDDEN to hide a folder, and then in a second step setting it to false, Sent Items became visible.
NB there seems to be some caching as I then had to remove and re-add the archive in Outlook's list of data files in the left pane before Sent Items became visible.
