Outlook question

Is there a way I could somehow read an email in Outlook and then make it disappear completely? I missed a conference call at work and got upbraided over it, yet I cannot remember getting an email about it. I’m very careful with my work email. I never delete anything permanently. The problem is I get so many junky emails from work because I work for a Fortune 10 company (benefits emails, discount emails, daily rah-rah emails, weekly rah-rah emails, summary emails, etc. and etc.) that I often open these briefly and close them again. Yes, I don’t gulp down the kool-aid automatically.

So I checked my inbox. I checked my deleted folder. I checked my sent folder to see if I replied to the email with a notification to accept, and couldn’t find the email. It’s maddening to be told you were sent an email, not remember getting it, and then find no evidence of it.

If I did get the email and checked it on my tiny iPhone 5 work phone and somehow dismissed the meeting notification, would the email have gone away entirely as if I had never received it? Any Outlook experts out there?

First, that’s fucked up. I hate that kind of shit at work, where the expectation is that I must have fucked up because … I don’t know why. I always speak out vociferously, if I feel like I’m getting jerked around that way.

That said, yes, you can make an email disappear completely in Outlook by deleting it from your inbox, and then going into the deleted messages folder and deleting it permanently. Like you, I try not to do this kind of delete unless it’s spam or bullshit mail I never want to track.

One thing I notice about Outlook and searches is that if you delete something and then search for it from your inbox, the search will not find the stuff in the deleted folder. Sometimes I delete the bullshit and then just let it sit in deleted messages until it automatically expires on its own. But then if I need to find something, I have to be careful about the focus of searches. This is the big difference between searching for stuff in Gmail and on an Exchange server.

I’m no expert, but what happens and annoys me is when meeting invites automatically go to the deleted folder after I accept the meeting. My guess, in your case, is that they sent it to somebody with a similar name and not to you. Or somehow sent it to your personal account, where Gmail swallowed it, or something like that.

I’ve had both those happen too

Desktop, not really. You kind of need to delete it twice - the second time from the deleted folder.

Throw phones in and who knows. I have had weird shit happen when browsing email by phone, including messages seemingly disappearing into the ether.

But in this case, I think you are probably right - Outlook calendar invites are placed in your calendar, regardless of whether the email was read or even responded to. The only way it was not in your calendar is if you did not get the invite, or you declined (even if by accident via phone). If you declined, accidentally or otherwise, it should be hard for them to chew you out, since technically you advised you would not be attending.

The frustrating thing is no one believes I didn’t see it, but think I screwed up somehow. Perhaps I did, but it certainly wasn’t a conscious decision to disregard a meeting and I have no memory of receiving the notification.

It also wasn’t on my calendar, but do meetings on calendars disappear once the date and time has passed?

To further add to my annoyance, my manager texted me telling me the call was in conference (it was an org-wide call with 300+ participants) but didn’t give me the number to dial in. Since I couldn’t find the email, I couldn’t dial in, and I texted back a minute or two later asking for the number and he never responded, and he was just listening. Then I get chastised after the call. So annoying!

I just want to figure out if I somehow screwed this up, then how did I do it, so I can avoid doing it in the future. I do enough dumb things in life that I’m aware of doing. To do yet another dumb thing and not realize I did it or how I managed to do it is really aggravating.

Nope, only if deleted after the fact, or the invite declined.

I have experienced that live meeting invites that were sent to me were never entered into my outlook calendar. I know that has happened to my colleges as well.

I remember going to Microsoft support a few iterations ago where it was known that if Techsmith’s snag-it was loaded into outlook it would cause live meeting that were created through outlook itself to fail (this was a few years ago). But every once in a while I see meetings fail to load for one reason or another.

Another problem I have run into is where Lync 2013 does not always work either.

So as everyone has already pointed out that’s pretty unlikely but not impossible.

Without knowing your exact exchange back end and outlook version I can’t say for sure, but often an org of that size will have a third layer of user accessible recovery like “Recover deleted items from server”.

Check your mobile devices as well. Again, depending on their setup they can cause issues like this.

I would recommend contacting your IT dept and asking them to look in the archive for the email. Tell them you are concerned that some messages aren’t reaching you. It also could be a greedy spam filter issue.

It could be an Outlook / Exchange (or any 3rd party add-ons) bug. I have had something similar happen to me, but caught it before the meeting happened. The person who issued the meeting invitation followed up with me in person because I hadn’t responded and I was a key participant. She pulled up the meeting notice and I was on it. She re-sent it to me with me watching her do it, and it again disappeared into the aether.

I did report this to our IT support department, and of course it never got resolved,

The one thing I didn’t hear anybody mention is to look in the Outlook Junk e-mail folder. If it went in there it acts just like it was deleted.

Don’t discount the problem being on the other end, and they don’t realize they screwed up, or are lying out their ass to cover-up for themselves at your expense. 300+ participants? People have trouble sending emails to a group of 5. Or one. And this is in IT. Heaven forbid you are relying on someone NOT in IT.

Jaded? Why do you ask?

I lol your post Daagar.

This is super annoying and dumb design, but I learned just the other week you can change this behaviour!