Hello, Teeming Millions. I was wondering if anyone could help me. I seem to have messages disappearing from Outlook. I need access to a secure system for my work in the hotel and I was supposed to be set up yesterday. I got an email with a user name and was told to watch for a separate email containing a temporary password. I was busy and going through emails and was almost certain that I saw this email, but when I went back later to get the password it wasn’t there.
No problem, I thought. This was somewhat inconvenient, but I thought I may have just been mistaken about having seen it. Tonight, when I came in, I saw another email. This one seemed to be the same as what I thought I had seen before. I even commented to a colleague that they were taking their time getting it to me, since it came in about 9:30pm and I needed it for my shift starting at 11.
Now . . . I can’t find this email. Does Outlook support James Bond shit like “this email will self-destruct in 60 seconds”? If this thing auto-deleted, is there a way to get it back? Need answer fast!
No, self-destructing emails don’t exist. Such a thing would violate a basic rule of computer security. Email is one of the primary avenues hackers use to attack* a system, so it’s usually locked down pretty well.
What’s more likely, is that outlook is configured (by you or whomever setup the computer) to hide or delete emails after you’ve read them. Check your ‘deleted items’ folder. If that doesn’t work, try connecting to the account from a different machine. It’s possible outlook only deleted the local copy.
Something I’ve occaisionally observed: you unwittingly run your email program with a filter to only show unread emails. Once you read an email, it’s not unread anymore and the “Unread only” filter removes it from view. But the email is still in the folder; just hidden by the filter.
In that case, turn off the “Unread only” view filter and you’ll see all the email.