Question : Outlook folders mysteriously missing

I'm running Exchange 2003 SP2 and my users have Outlook 2003 and OWA access.  Two of my users now have had folders that they created go missing.  These folders were mail folders that they would move old messages into for organization.  My boss, one of the victims, had named his folder "cabinet" and it was on the same level in the folder list as the inbox.  The problem PCs don't use ost files... they work off the server.

I've looked through all the deleted items and did the registry edit to set DumpsterAlwaysOn, but even with that I could not find his lost folder.  Would appreciate any insights to whats going on and how to recover these missing folders... or info on a third party product which might be able to find and recover this data.

Restoring a backup isn't practical... my backup only allows restoring the entire database of users, not just one user mailbox.

Answer : Outlook folders mysteriously missing

You may have already checked, but make sure he didn't accidentally move it into another folder. It's easy to do when folks start dragging mail into folders -- they sometimes drag the folder.

Without doing a backup, you could use Exmerge to copy his mailbox to a .pst file -- then import the .pst file back in to Outlook and see if the folder is there.