Recovering Exchange Items When Entourage Corruption Deleted Them From The Server

I have a client who has an Exchange 2003 server and uses Entourage for the Mac. Last week all his sent items disappeared. It seems the problem is that Entourage’s local database corrupted and sync’ed back to the server that all these items where now deleted!

To recover them I used PFDAVAdmin from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=22427 and expanded the installation on the server to an empty folder. Within this empty folder I located pfdavadmin.exe and run the software:

Once the program is running, and ensure that you are logged in to the server as a user with a mailbox (as that seemed to stop the program working), click File and Connect:

Select All Mailboxes (I could not get the https:// URL for specified mailboxes to work, so I just went for All Mailboxes

Once the Getting Mailbox List dialog disappears you are left with PFDAVAdmin as before, just showing +Mailboxes. Expand Mailboxes, expand your selected problem mailbox, expand Top of Information Store and then locate the folder that contained the missing items. In my clients case it was Sent Items.

From the right hand screen select the Items tab. Wait for the items to appear and then from the bottom pick Deleted Contents (I’ve found if you change to Deleted Contents while the “Normal Contents” list is still being collected that PFDAVAdmin fails and you need to open a new copy of the program). The screen will update (eventually if you have lots of items) with a list of items that have Unknown for the Item-level Perms column. Select as many as you need to (I found PFDAVAdmin crashes if you pick more than 1000 items) and right-click the selection  to choose Recover Items

Once recovery starts you need to wait a while based on the number of items recovered and then you will get dialog box popup confirming your selection. Press OK, or if the dialog is too pick to fit on the screen just press Enter, and recovery completes.

Repeat until you have all the items recovered, and I would recommend rebuilding the Entourage identity as well, as that database on Entourage is now to be considered suspect.