No matter how hard I try, I still have users that remove folders from their mail db BEFORE deleting the messages inside the folders. This makes the messages end up in limbo (aka the “All Documents” view only) and their mail file continues to mushroom. Is there any plan to add functionality to prompt the user to see if they want to move the messages in that folder to trash prior to removing the folder or should I just keep hounding them?
Thanks!!
Subject: You can always add a “Contains docs not in any folders” view to the mail template and name it “Limbo”.
Subject: (One extra step)
Thanks Bruce–much appreciated. That’s what I ended up doing; I had vaguely remembered this was a view option from a few years back.
If you recall, I wanted a view to find missing messages only. When you create this view you cannot modify your view selection. As a result you are still seeing documents that are in the sent view, so you get “false positives” for some of the “hidden messages”. You need to find a way to tag them and tweak the view.
What I did was to create an agent that you can run in the sent view, to tag sent messages (manually run as a spot check for hidden messages):
FIELD Tag :=“1”;
SELECT @All
Then in the view showing messages not contained in any folders, I created two preceeding columns:
descending:
Tag != “1” & (Form = “Memo” : “Reply”)
and categorized:
@If(Tag != “1” & (Form = “Memo” : “Reply”);“HIDDEN MESSAGES- Safe to delete”;“Other database files-DO NOT DELETE”)
NOTE
This is a crude method of finding the files. Drafts and stationery still show up as false positives at this point. Also, if more sent messages are created, they will show up as false positives unless you go back to the sent view and “tag” again.
When run on our network, some users were finding tons of messages that had no ties to the folder views–some of these messages were not assigned to removed folders, so we don’t know how they became hidden. Others had one or two messages or none.
I hope this helps someone else with limited scripting get some insight into phantom emails. Good luck and always back up your mail before using some knucklehead’s code (aka mine)
Todd