I work for a network management company and we recently migrated several of our clients over to Office 365 and set them up with Business Essential licenses.

For most everybody the migration went off without a hitch. Almost all of them were already using Outlook as their primary email. We went in one by one, created a new mail profile in Windows that pointed to their new Exchange profile, backed up all of their pst and ost files, installed the most up to date version of Office, got everyone to sign in to their new Office profiles and made certain that when they opened Outlook that they were signing into the right profile there too, and then began importing all the pst files from their previous account so they wouldn't lose any of their old emails. Again, for most people, this went over perfectly smoothly; everything syncs fine, no emails were lost in the process, everything appeared on portal.office.com, all good.

But here's my question/problem. There are three users with two different problems.

Problem one:

After migrating to the Outlook/Office one of our users had her folder structure and archives disappear on her. We can add the previous pst files and archives but her current list still doesn't adopt or import the folder structure. All of her separate folders are still there in the old files but her inbox now has thousands of emails that were previously all separated out into organized folders.

Is there anyway to recreate that folder structure without copying over all her old emails? And ideally: we could just recreate all the folders for her manually, and that will probably happen, but is there any way to automatically filter all of her old emails (that are still in the inbox, not the pst/archive files) into the folders they use to be in? If not then she will have to do that manually as well and that doesn't make for happy clients.

Problem two:

Two other clients are now missing emails. We migrated their accounts, merged all of the pst files over, got them signed in correctly everywhere, all that. However several days after importing all the old emails two of our clients noticed that they were missing chunks of their emails. Specifically they are missing about a month and a half of emails. The migration happened near the end of last month, the missing emails for both clients span from around the middle of March to the end of April. But they don't simply disappear up to right when we did the migration, they both have about a week's worth of emails from right before the migration. We've looked through their systems and pulled out all of the pst and ost files, looked through them, and they do not have the missing emails. We've forced their Outlook to sync with Exchange servers, we've looked through the OWA, nothing. Does anyone know what may cause this?

Hi,

For Problem One:

Check the user's folder structure on OWA, what is it like?

Based on the description, make sure the OP has configured the account as an Exchange Account in Outlook; it seems like it is a POP3 account now, which doesn't inherit the folder structure.

For Problem Two:

It's hard to say how these emails are missing... If they are also missing from OWA, it should be really missing instead of some view issues.

Now we may need to search all the backups of the emails and try to find them back, pay attention to some places like "Deleted Items" and archives.

Regards,

Melon Chen
TechNet Community Su

The first client, the one who has lost their file structure, was on an Exchange Active Sync Account before and is still on one now. They just migrated from a hosted Exchange to Office 365. No POP3 was ever used.

For the second set of clients, their "Deleted Items" folders do not contain the missing ~month and a half of emails.