Little old lady and the missing emails.

[dmf]

well i guess i should start with a little background info.

i worked in a computer consultancy company as one of their support peons.
i was working for them 3 days a week mon, tues and thurs(this is important later).
so work begins on a sunny monday morning, all bright and hopefully wishing for but never expecting a good day at work.
+1 hour
i get a "nice little lady" who had her computer reinstalled on friday and hooked up to the AD server. she is missing a few emails and cant find them.

it turns out that she had forgotten to tell friday's tech that she had thousands of emails saved on that computer in a non-standard place. not to mention the 2 private "pop3 download and delete" email addresses and the massive non standard contact book full of email addresses. all set up on her "just for work use" company laptop.

i explain to her the problem in a nice and friendly way.
and just get shouted at for the next twenty minutes about how its all my fault. and how i should have asked her before doing anything to her laptop.
even after explaining that i wasn't even in the county on the day she dropped her laptop in, she still kept shouting then leaving before returning and shouting some more. this pretty much went on for the rest of the day.

so i spent the next few hours using all the file recovery software i can lay my hands on, and manage to recover all of her work emails. but none of her personal stuff.

the next week i go into work and find out that she had made a complaint against me for rude conduct. and i got a nice verbal warning for it.

so that was one of the many things that drove me to quit.

[trunks2k]

It's kinda like the lady that called me up years ago (wow... that's over 7 years ago). She was complaining that her e-mail kept disappearing from outlook, every time she closes it and that this is the Nth time she's called about, and we're idiots because we can't fix her problem, etc.

I send her a test e-mail, open up her outlook, see that it's there, close outlook, and open it up again and see the e-mail is still there. I tell her that it seems to be working fine. Then she says I missed a step. I tell her to show me. So she moves the e-mail from the inbox to the DELETED items folder, closes outlook, and opens it back up. Of course, no surprise, the e-mail is now gone. I explained to her of course it was, as Outlook is always set to delete items in the deleted items folder (which couldn't be changed due to company policy), and tell her not to put stuff in there unless she never wants to see it again. For the life of me, I could not get this through her head. I spent half an hour trying to explain this to her, and she just. didn't. get. it. I even used an analogy about throwing an apple that you intend to eat into the garbage then being upset when the garbage is emptied. Still, no dice.

I finally got her off the phone. I checked her history (which I should have done in the first place) and see she called fifteen times about it. Each with the same resolution - "Told customer not to place e-mails into deleted items folder unless she intends to never see them again". Of course, she called back the next day with the same issue, asking for me. I pawned her off on someone else.

[technical.angel]

Ouch..

My ex's mom did the same thing, use the deleted items as storage.. I was never asked to support their computer again after I cleaned out her deleted items....

[mattm04]

I finally got her off the phone. I checked her history (which I should have done in the first place) and see she called fifteen times about it. Each with the same resolution - "Told customer not to place e-mails into deleted items folder unless she intends to never see them again". Of course, she called back the next day with the same issue, asking for me. I pawned her off on someone else.

What part of DELETED do they not get!

[trunks2k]

What part of DELETED do they not get!

Thinking back on it, I think it had something to do with the size limit on the accounts. The company put a fairly strict limit on the amount of space an account could take up, especially when considering the amount of e-mail that went around (large pharma company, lots of documents flying around). For some reason she was absolutely convinced that the items that were in her deleted items didn't count towards her limit.

[Geek King]

For some reason she was absolutely convinced that the items that were in her deleted items didn't count towards her limit.

To be fair, after she shut the program down, and they deleted, they didn't count anymore.

[technical.angel]

Actually..... I believe we don't count email in the deleted items against storage limits. Mainly because email is deleted out of the deleted items every... three months?

[Geek King]

Actually..... I believe we don't count email in the deleted items against storage limits. Mainly because email is deleted out of the deleted items every... three months?

True, I wasn't thinking about alternate settings. Our default install is set to clear the deleted folder when the program is shut down. We don't prevent people from changing the interval, but most leave it as is.

[SteeleDragon78]

Actually..... I believe we don't count email in the deleted items against storage limits. Mainly because email is deleted out of the deleted items every... three months?

actually this is false. it does count towards your limit. and has caused many an airline mailbox to close because the (l)user has changed the setting to not empty the deleted items folder on close. the only way it doesnt count against the limit is if your org requires use of pst files. which keep everything client side rather than server side. though thats another can of worms all together.

(sorry to sound preachy there, i just had a 45 min call regarding this exact issue with a truly sucktacular cranial/rectal inversion)