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Microsoft Outlook Could End Up Deleting Your Emails: What You Need to Know

Company warns of new issue hitting Outlook email client

Jul 23, 2020 15:30 GMT  ·  By
Microsoft Outlook version
   Microsoft Outlook version

Microsoft Outlook is without a doubt one of the most popular email clients right now, and given that the adoption of Office 365 has increased substantially in the last few months, it makes sense for this app to also benefit from a continuously growing number of users.

And while Outlook comes with a massive feature package, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it always provides a flawless experience from one end to another.

And unfortunately, there are times when the Outlook app actually ends up hitting major bugs, as it’s the case of the one we’re going to talk about today.

As it turns out, Outlook version 2006 build 13001.20266 or higher can end up crashing, eventually deleting three or even more mails from your account. This only happens if you configured Outlook with a POP account and enabled the Download Headers Only option.

To determine the version of Outlook that you’re running, launch the app and then head over to this path:

Outlook > Menu > Office Account > About Outlook Microsoft says the bug also happens on newer versions of Outlook, so if your build is anything higher than the one mentioned above, there’s a chance you might hit this issue.

IMAP and Exchange accounts are not affected by the email removal bug.

Microsoft says that the easiest way to determine if Outlook experienced this issue is to look in the Windows Event Viewer Application Log to check the app crashes.

To launch the Windows Event Viewer, click the Start menu and then type Event Viewer. In the app, expand the Applications and Services Logs to look for any logs created by Outlook.

If the email app crashed, the log should display the following information:


Faulting application name: OUTLOOK.EXE, version: 16.0.13102.20002, time stamp: 0x5efe7a9e
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 10.0.19041.207, time stamp: 0xcad89ab4
Exception code: 0xc0000409
Fault offset: 0x000000000008b48f
Faulting process id: 0x5748
Faulting application start time: 0x01d65a1988bf274f
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\OUTLOOK.EXE
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll
 Microsoft says the company is already investigating the issue, but an ETA as to when a fix could be released still isn’t available. Worth knowing is that your emails aren’t gone forever, as the POP account could allow them to be stored on the mail server. On the other hand, Microsoft says that users who need to fix the whole thing right now and don’t want to wait for the company to come up with a fix can just revert Office to the previous version. In other words, you can downgrade the full productivity suite to an earlier release where the bug did not exist.

Of course, doing this can’t be done from the Office UI, but on the other hand, the whole thing doesn’t require more than a couple of clicks. Make sure that you are logged in with an administrator account, and then in the Start menu type run. In the dialog that shows up on the screen, type the following command to bring Office to the previous version:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun\officec2rclient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.12827.20470 A system reboot shouldn’t be required, but you should still close all Office apps and relaunch them afterwards. At this point, everything should be working properly, with Outlook no longer crashing and deleting emails regardless of the mail accounts configured in the app.

At this point, it’s still not known when the issue is supposed to be fixed, as it’s still marked with an under investigation label on Microsoft’s page, so the workaround here is pretty much the only way to go.