I came across an interesting problem today that had me scratching my head for an hour or so and could not find anything in google to resolve the issue.

I was in the office of one of our clients and he had just setup a rule in Outlook 2016 to move all the email from his lawyer into a folder. This is simple stuff so far.

He then decided to move the folder that he had the rule on to a new location and all of his email just disappeared.

All the email also disappeared on the IMAP email server and at this stage things were starting to look very bad. There was a lot of important information and advice from the lawyer in the email folder that had built up over the past year.

Once I was able to confirm exactly where the folder had been all we had to do was recreate the folder with the exact same name. Like magic the emails started to appear back into the folder.

The problem seems to be something to do with having an email rule setup to move things to an non existing folder. Outlook seems to put the emails into limbo.

I am going to assume that if the folder was renamed this would cause the same issues.

This issue can also be resolved by going into rule manager in Outlook 2016 and updating the folder selection to where you moved the folder to.

The client was very happy that he had a managed IT contract with iPing and we were able to get him all his important email back!

If you would like iPing to manage your IT please contact us