A customer recently called saying that email messages were gone when moved from their inbox to another folder. Here’s how we fixed it.

First we checked the folders adjacent to see if it had been dragged there by mistake, this can happen in Outlook, especially if you have a lot of sub-folders. When you’re in a hurry or are doing an Inbox cleanup it’s easy to drag a message to the wrong folder by mistake – and difficult to find afterwards.
We also checked the Outlook Deleted folder to see if, somehow, the message had gone there.

 
Turns out the message WAS in the folder, we just couldn’t see it. Here’s the solution.

• In Outlook 2010 click the View tab for the ribbon bar
• Click on the folder you want and then click View Settings
• Go to advanced and see if there is any advanced filtering shown.
• If so, remove it and click OK.

 
You will now be able to see all email messages in that folder.
We had to go through each Outlook folder to confirm no filtering was taking place – there is no way in Outlook to highlight all folders and change them all at the same time.

If you’re sure you moved an Outlook message to the right sub-folder, but can’t see it show up in that folder then check for filtering on the folder.