A simple matter of…

So, I woke up hoping that the corruption would have been fixed. But no Instead I got a reply saying that they hadn’t found any corruption (but they obviously havn’t tried IMAP….) They suggested two approaches:

1. reboot. disable anti-virus. create new profile
2. they’d recreate the account and merge the data back in

For Pete’s sake. They are _still_ harping on about #1 which with _any_ knowledge they know wouldnt’ fix it. God almighty.
I told them to do #2.

Given their obviously inability to do basic problem determination or troubleshooting of any form whatsoever I did more troubleshooting. I wrote some expect to run the IMAP command (”1 fetch XXX full”) (where when XXX=247 things are fine, when XXX=248 Exchange gives an internal error). I ran this over the 2501 emails that the IMAP server reported. 10 had errors and 1 timed out (10 _second_ timeout). I retried that one and it worked. So 10 failures. I then tried to POP3 - ooh 2491 emails. Note that 2491 + 10 = 2501.

So I reported this useful bit of information at about 08:30 this morning. At 12:40 they ask if they can reset my password. I just tell them it instead so that I can continue to use the dreadful web interface in the meantime.

Then nothing - until 18:55 - 6 hours later “we are working on it”. Well thanks for the update (would have been nicer after say 2 hours rather than 6 but hey).

And now at 20:00, progress! They’ve copied the mailbox except for, you’ll never believe it, ten messages. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/268141 seems to be implicated by the fact that six messages are from Debian (and that’s likely all the signed emails I have). One message is saying (MAPI_W_PARTIAL_COMPLETION) which apparently means it is soft-deleted (so WTF can’t the tool grab those - a little more work granted, but it’s probably only marked as deleted (or in a deleted folder).

I’ve asked if they can recover the other three messages (I missed one but it’s not important) from the backups. Let’s see what happens.