Moving an incoming mail to pst file connected to Outlook

Question

Hi All,
Many thanks in advance, a mailbox that is hosted on Exchange 2016. Now, I wanted to understand on what will happen to the incoming mail, once it is manually moved to a PST that is connected to Outlook.
Now, I know that once the mail is manually moved to the PST file it will no longer be available in Inbox. All I want to understand is how the server copy of the mailbox will be updated post move? Like whether these mails will be moved to recoverable items on the server-copy or it's gone forever??

Answer 1

Hi @Niranjan T Pattana Shetty ,

Now, I know that once the mail is manually moved to the PST file it will no longer be available in Inbox. All I want to understand is how the server copy of the mailbox will be updated post move? Like whether these mails will be moved to recoverable items on the server-copy or it's gone forever??

Based on my test, the mails moved to the PST file will be moved to the recoveralbe items folder. See the gif below:
user1's mailbox is configured in Outlook using cached mode, "test" is a PST file opened within Outlook. I manually moved an incoming message from user1's Inbox to the folder TEST1 in the PST file, then I checked the Recover Deleted Items, as we can see, the mail I just moved was there:

In addition, considering that the Recover Deleted Items feature in Outlook corresponds to the Deletions subfolder within the Recoverable Items folder of the mailbox(see this official document), so I opened up the Deletions subfolder using the MFCMAPI tool and tested with anther incoming message(subject "abc"), the process is a bit more intuitive:

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Answer 2

A few things here

1. If Outlook is connecting to an Exchange server it should be replicating the data between the Outlook OST and the Exchange Server, i.e. this allows the information to exists in both locations which is far better/safer then only having them in a PST file.
2. If you are actually setting up Outlook to purposefully use a PST, first I would ask why this is being down and second what happens to the data depends on your configuration, i.e. you can tell it to REMOVE the messages from the server OR to leave a copy on the server.

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