Having any issues with deleted or duplicated emails lately?
Well we have come across a Microsoft Support Knowledge Base article that will be of interest to anyone out there using Outlook 2016 and POP3 accounts.
The article, KB3145116, describes the following as the symptoms that are indicative of this issue:
- After Outlook downloads your email, all the email messages on the server are deleted from the Inbox.
- Email messages are downloaded multiple times in Outlook, causing duplicate items.
The issues described above occur if you are using Outlook 2016 version 16.0.6568.2025 and have setup any email accounts that are accessed using the POP3 protocol.
There are three settings that may cause the inadvertent and unexpected removal or duplication of emails if you have the Leave a copy of messages on the Server enabled along with these options:
- If Remove from server after X days is enabled it may cause emails to be deleted from your account on the server.
- If Remove from server after X days is disabled it may cause emails to be duplicated in your local account.
Microsoft is currently looking into this problem and will update the knowledge base article once they have more information. I am sure an appropriate update will also be shipped once they know what needs to be updated/modified.
In the interim they have published two workaround options for this which include using IMAP instead of POP3, if your service provider supports it of course, while the second method is to revert back to a previous version of Outlook/Office 2016.
Unfortunately, not everyone has the ability to use either of those options so hopefully this gets resolved sooner rather than later.
If you can take advantage of either workaround you can get the full step by step process on the KB3145116 page at Microsoft's Support site.
