Question about Outlook Express

We use Office 365 and on friday we had a power shortage (dont know if this is relevant but better mention it)

Today when the user started outlook all email in outlook was missing except those from today.

In OWA it was the same, all mail exept todays is missing.

Finder locates all mail but the file extension is .olk14message.

When opening a file it shows that it is the correct message.

We tried the solution from this site (http://www.macworld.com/article/2029414/recovering-a-lost-outlook-message.html)

and after changing the file-extension to .eml the mail showed up in outlook.

But the mail is still missing in OWA.

The amount of mail missing is 1000+ so manually changing the file-extension is not a good solution.

My questions are:

Is there any way I can import these mail into outlook and get the synced to Office365 other than manually changing the file-extension?
Why did this happened?

How do we prevent it from happening again (have several MAC-users)

At first Outlook just crashed when I Quit. I could live with that. Low priority.

A few days later it refused to open "There is a problem with the office database..." and it offered a rebuild... which fell over on step 4 [-18000]

So using MS Database Util I created a new identity, set it to be default.

Copied the previous identity folders to the new.

Rebuild... which fell over on step 4 [-18000]

And so it has gone on and on. No matter what I try.

I even copied each database folder over one at a time and rebuilt after each copy. Which had limited success. Contacts, Events, Mail Accounts, Notes and Signatures all now appear in the new identity within Outlook. But add say Folders, and it fails.

-18000 is far from useful as an error code.  It's not as if I can look up the error code. 

Rebuilds falling over at stage 4 are apparently often associated with disk space issues - the required free space rule = <identity size> * 3 +10% in order to not fail is a rule of thumb, but for the record my identity is 3.7GB and the freespace on the HD is 440GB. So that’s  multiple of 10 at least for the free space.

It may be that Folders relies upon one of the other mail folders (Messages, Message Sources, Message Attachments) but how would I know? Does anyone?

It's serious stuff for me - a decade+ of my life hangs in the balance and after 10 years of using MS Windows based products without having a calamity like this (especially post-conversion of the .PST from ANSI to UNICODE) I am unimpressed with the OS X offering. 

Having delved into the file system of Outlook 2011 it reminds me of the un-lamented Outlook Express which had a poor reputation for reliability which I would attribute to having (way fewer, like no 0T/0B/0M for instance) folders and many files containing different parts of the whole.  The single .PST file of Windows Outlook hasn't missed a beat on my ancient WinTel box for years. This is a new Mac with new software (10.9.4).

I'll dismount (or should that be eject) myself from my horse and see if anyone can offer any sage advice.

If the Outlook client is as flakey as I have found it to be I am heading towards maybe Outlook.com or would this be throwing good energy after bad.

Sorry 'bout the rant bits... it's really trying my patience :)

Help??

Hi

I have successfully converted a sample .pst file for use on Outlook for Mac however it stored the new file on my MAC hard drive. I have about 50 Gigs of .pst files that i would like to covert however would like them to be stored on an external hard drive and not the mac. Is there a way you can do that ?  

MAC application preferences page normally include a folder location but that is not available in the Outlook App. 

Thanks in advance.

Hi there,

In this article here http://www.officeformachelp.com/outlook/backup-options/ scrolling down to point 4, there's mention of SuperDuper (the paid version capable of smart backups) to back up Outlook 2011 for Mac.

Can you please clarify a little better what SuperDuper can do further or better than Time Machine to back up Outlook 2011?

I'm quite familiar with both tools and I'm asking cause according to what is mentioned in the article above I might be missing something useful to back up Outlook 2011.

Thanks for helping

My Outlook for Mac 2011 IMAP email accounts DOWNLOADED and DELETED all of my emails from my host/server, and crashed -- went blank.  I lost everything.  I was able to restore from a backup to my laptop (but not the server), but lost changes during the down time.  How could this happen with IMAP accounts and how can I keep it from happening again?

The creation of IMAP accounts is supposed to guarantee that there will always be two copies of my emails -- one on my laptop's Outlook and one on my host's server.  However, although I had configured Outlook for IMAP accounts, it downloaded the original emails before and/or as a part of the crash.  

I use Outlook 2011 (14.4.3) to connect to my organization's Exchange server from my Mac (OS 10.9). Normally I receive mail shortly after it was sent, but on occasion Outlook will refuse to check my mail for periods ranging from minutes to hours.

By "refuse to check my mail" I mean that:
    •    No new mail comes in, even if I know new messages are waiting
    •    When I click the "send/receive" button, the button responds with a click animation, but it does not check my mail.
    •    If I open the "progress" window (cmd-7) I can confirm that no activity is shown.

During these times:
    •    I can log in to webmail and confirm that there are messages that haven't been downloaded.
    •    My mac has full connectivity otherwise
    •    Outlook is able to send emails, which are received by others right away (but my sent mail box isn't updated either).

    •    The status message in the lower-right still says "connected to [account name]" and accurately displays the last time it connected to the server.

The problem sometimes resolves spontaneously, and I'll get a bunch of old mail at once.

Quitting and restarting usually fixes the problem. But that requires me to notice that it's happening, which sometimes doesn't happen for several hours, during which I can miss emails that required an immediate response.

Can anyone offer any suggestions or diagnostic steps?