Hi Lisa,

I'm not sure I can help, but I'm fairly sure we'll need more information if anyone else can...

We have qmail / dovecot running IMAP and a user who had all their email in their non-Outlook client (Thunderbird?).

Here, do you mean that their email was in a LOCAL folder in Thunderbird? I mean, was Thunderbird accessing it through IMAP, or was this email in some POP/LOCAL folder on that users computer?

I think you meant you were using Thunderbird to access their IMAP account, so it shouldn't matter what IMAP client you use, all of the mail and folders should be there.

We installed Outlook 2003 and configured it with IMAP and all their email EXCEPT a three week block showed up. The three week block of email is not on their desktop and even worse, isn't on the server / in qmail - its totally gone.

Is this '3 week block' at the beginning or end of the mail that is there? Or in the middle somewhere. Was it in the Inbox? Sent folder? A different folder?

I do know that Outlook uses a different name for the Sent folder than Thunderbird (I think it is 'Sent Items')...

Is it possible that Outlook is configured to 'Delete mail older than' or something like that?

Does anyone have any idea of why or how this would have occured? And even better - is there any hope we could ever find this email (its not on a backup)?

Sounds like it was some kind of user error somewhere... kind of hard to figure out after the fact though, unless possibly there is something in the logs right about the time the mail disappeared.

Sorry I couldn't be more help, and good luck - and hopefully you'll start to keep better backups after this! ;)

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Best regards,

Charles