A coworker sent me an email asking about some work we did a while back. My response email had his text on bottom, plus three old emails attached and some explanatory text.
Later that day, in looking through my “Sent Items” folder, I saw what actually went out. All the text was gone - both his attached text and my own - as was the Subject line. All that remained were the three attached emails (in reverse order).
What happened?
Outlook does not keep attachments in a “Reply”. It does in a “Forward”. After all, you are replying to the person who sent you the stuff; why clog his mailbox with a second copy of what could be a huge attachment, since he already has it?
No logical reason why the Subject line would be blanked, though. It should have just added “RE:” to the subject line…
You have it backwords. The attachments were still there. The text was all gone.
[And the reason the attachments were still there was because they were not attachments that he had sent me. I added these attachments to my reply email.]
Good question. Ask your mail admin. (Unless you are the mail admin, in which case… check for mail database corruption? I honestly don’t know the next step here.) There’s no quick and easy answer for this… it’s not like Outlook has a checkbox “delete all text from Sent emails” and you accidentally turned it on or something, there’s definitely a problem.
It might also be useful to contact the person you emailed to make sure they got the same thing you’re seeing in your Sent folder. If they got the full text, then the corruption might just be in your local email database and not the server.
I’m pretty sure the guy got the same thing I saw. I didn’t ask directly, but when I saw what happened and immediately sent another email in which I added back the missing text, and described what had happened. If he had gotten the complete email the first time he would have mentioned it.