Its not just moving sent items to another folder, it happens to any mail with any change of attributes, ie, when an email is marked as read, or if an email in the inbox is moved to another folder or deleted. it just 'disappears' from outlook altogether. It appears to be random, and not frequent, it could be 1 email out of 100 over a couple of weeks, for another client it seems to be every couple of days.
In one case the client is receiving a large number of emails during the day, quickly reads them to determine urgency, and in a lot of cases will move them to a subfolder or flag them for follow up later in the day. Once he goes back several hours later, he wont remember every email which should be there, he actions everything and moves on.
Nearly every client we have has a different unread mail count ie 'Inbox 1324' in outlook and Smartermail web client, so going into to webmail to try and locate an email which doesn't exist in outlook demonstrates to the client that there is a whole lot more missing than he realized, doing a line by line compare from outlook to smartermail looking for lost emails is almost futile.
The "Known' issue was known before I submitted the ticket, this wasn't acknowledged to me from the start
We had spent many hours trying to figure out what was happening, thinking it must be something at our end.
I understand that everything has bugs, Once we know they exist we can work with them or around them, its the nature of the business. ie The all day calendar items the would jump to the previous day when created etc, once we know, we can discuss with the client and keep the client managed until the fix is in place.(which it was)
However missing emails has a substantial impact as it is tool that is heavily relied upon for business, the implications of a client missing orders for example, for what could be tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars because the email disappeared is serious risk.
As it stands, this last client we have lost, we had been holding off for months, explaining that the issue will be resolved, they have lost faith in the product and have instructed us to move them back in house, at our cost.
Outlook is buggy, so is every other piece of software out there. but we know that and work with it, the devil you know....
Outlook is by far the most widely used business email client (at least in this part of the world) so suggesting the client move away from this software, purchasing a new email client for every user, installing and training every user in the use of the new software would need a much more compelling case than 'the new software might work better with out hosted mail solution that we are selling you'
what we know...
We didn't appear to have this problem up till previously, somewhere around the beginning of the year. if its due to an update in outlook, let us know which one, we'll remove it, if its another Microsoft update, again, we can block it, until its resolved.
We know Outlook syncs to a hosted smartermail solution and intermittent syncs don't happen and email disappears from outlook
Change outlook to a hosted exchange solution, also using active sync, issue doesn't occur
We know, in smartermail if we find a missing email, we can change an attribute and the email will 'usually' reappear in outlook again.
We know the email still exists in smartermail
We know that IOS and Andriod devices, using active sync work without issue
What we don't know is:
Is Smartertools are any closer to resolving this issue than they were 3 months ago, is there light at the end of the tunnel
Is there a simple work around to initiate activesync to 'resync' a clients inbox manually or via script that has worked for anyone
Is this still being actively worked on by smartertools, should we be waiting for a solution
Does Smartertools know specifically what the issue is? or should we be looking for contributing factors, ie AV, etc at our end?
Matt, have you had any instances similar to this? what does your client base use predominantly as an email client?