dovecot - Jan 2007 - help with deleted segment of email when connecting Outlook?

This group was so helpful last time I am hoping someone can HELP!  We have
qmail / dovecot running IMAP and a user who had all their email in their
non-Outlook client (Thunderbird?).  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.
 
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)?  Hopefully,
 
Lisa
 
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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! ;)

-- 

Best regards,

Charles