Using Outlook 2003 (all of Office 2003), all the latest updates, in Win
XPSP3.

I wrote a long important e-mail this morning, addressed to several people. I
clicked Send, then Send and Receive, and assumed my message was sent.

I received an e-mail from one of the addressees, indicating that the
received e-mail was blank, no message.

I went to my Sent Items folder, with the intention of forwarding that sent
message to this one addressee.

The message title appeared in Sent Items folder, along with the addressees.
But the message was blank--nothing at all in message window-although I had
written a long message. I cannot find that text I had written anywhere!

What could have happened?

Where could I possibly find that missing text, so I do not have to write the
message again?

Thank you in advance for your assistance. :-)

I will add a piece of information that I forgot to mention before. It is
probably not relevant to the problem, but just in case it is, I will mention
it here.

The original message in question was an HTML-formatted message. A long
HTML-formatted message was in the message body when I clicked "Send".

The message that now appears in my "Sent Items" folder has, as said, the
Message Subject and the Recipients listed, but the message body is blank.
Furthermore, the message body is listed as being formatted Plain Text.

Therefore, somehow in the sending process, all the text in the message body
was lost, and the formatting of the message was changed from HTML to Plain
Text.

I would still greatly appreciate help with this. Thank you.

"MS" nospam.com> wrote in message
news:u6G5rxH3IHA.3500@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...

I'll add something else.

As that long e-mail took me hours to write, I many times clicked File, Save,
to save the message. Probably as well, pretty recently before clicking the
Send button, to send the message.

When one saves a message, I know it is saved in the "Drafts" folder. That
message is not there now, though. I guess when one clicks Send on a message,
and it goes to the Outbox, it is immediately deleted from Drafts. Such
messages do not appear in "Deleted Items" though.

I wonder, however, if the message might somehow still be under Drafts, but
hidden, and if there could be a way to revive it?

I hope someone can help with this problem. Thank you.

"MS" nospam.com> wrote in message
news:ezL2grI3IHA.5024@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...

First of all, since it took you so long to write that message, I assume
that it should be quite large. What is the size of the message in the
Sent Items folder? If it is not just 1KB or 2KB like an empty message,
then we must assume that the text is still there, but has somehow become
invisible.

If that is the case, open the message, right-click on the message body
and select View Source. Do you see now your original text (interspersed
with HTML tags)?

MS wrote:

Thanks for the suggestion, Pat.

I already tried that, "View Source". All that I see are a couple HTML tags,
no text.

Any other ideas?

What happens to a message that has been saved, that is in the Drafts folder,
when one clicks Send (putting it in the Outbox)? One doesn't see it listed
any more under Drafts, but is the saved version there somewhere?

As data is changed in a .pst file, what happens to the previous version of
that file?

It sure would be nice if Outlook saved a .bak copy of the .pst every ten
minutes or so, so if something like this happened, one would have a backup
copy, still with the data. (I know there are backup programs for Outlook,
but they can only work when Outlook is not running, a very different
situation.

I tried Scanpst, Office Repair, and a few other things.

No, it's not still stored somewhere else. The item in the Drafts folder is
still the same item as that ends up in your Sent Items folder; it gets moved
depending on the status (composing-> sending-> sent).

My guess in what happened is that you have a virus scanner that integrates
with Outlook and corrupted the item by scanning it before sending it. That
also explains why it gets converted to Plain Text. You really should disable
your virus scanner's integration with Outlook. It is redundant and doesn't
offer any layer of extra protection. See
http://www.msoutlook.info/question/20

Not a good idea. Considering an average pst-file is quite large, copying
such a large file every 10 minutes will generate way too much disk I/O and
renders your computer unusable.

Sorry to hear you lost your message, but this corruption is caused by a 3rd
party product.

Thank you for the reply, Roady.

The virus scanner I use is Symantec's corporate AV. I forget if it has
Outlook integration. I'll check. You say that it (integration with Outlook)
is completely unnecessary?

The virus scanner could delete all the text in an e-mail, before sending it?

Are you saying that the text I typed is probably completely unrecoverable,
not anywhere to be found on the hard drive, so I should give it up, and
re-write the e-mail? Hard to believe it isn't somewhere.

When a .PST file is changed, is the past version of it (now deleted) not
recoverable somehow, with a file recovery app? (I've tried, so far with no
luck.)

"Roady [MVP]" wrote in
message news:3DB5CC24-BE6F-4DFA-A213-959808617BF5@microsoft.com...

Well, here is another suggestion. (I don't know if the developers read these
NGs, or if the MVPs can forward suggestions to them.)

"Roady [MVP]" wrote in
message news:3DB5CC24-BE6F-4DFA-A213-959808617BF5@microsoft.com...

Hello again Robert,

I looked at the configuration of Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition. Under
the configuration of Realtime Protection, there is no e-mail or Outlook
protection. There is (of course) the File System Protection, and also Lotus
Notes and Microsoft Exchange Protection. (I don't use Exchange. My Outlook
mailboxes are POP3.) File System protection was turned on, so was Exchange,
and Lotus Notes was turned off. I turned off the Exchange protection. But
that could not have caused the problem, could it, since I was not using
Exchange?

Yes. What advantages did you expect from it?

Yes, gone. Why is that so hard to believe? Create a txt-file, type in it,
save it, remove the text, save it again. Result; text gone forever. In your
case you saved the draft while composing but when pressing Send, Norton
opened it again, did its crappy work and saved it again without text.

No, because the file isn't being rewritten but appended/shrunk when you
add/change/remove an item.

A pst-file is a database which is a completely different concept then a Word
document when it comes to writing data within the pst-file. You must also
understand that it is not Outlook that lost data...