Cloud Hosted Solutions Bypass Common Issues of Vanishing Email

By Laura Stotler
TMCnet Contributing Editor

Anyone who uses email on an even semi-regular basis has experienced the curious phenomenon of the disappearing message. There are many reports of vanishing or blank emails from Microsoft (News - Alert) Outlook users, but I’ve also had messages go poof when toggling among apps in iOS on my phone and iPad.

Fortunately for Outlook and Exchange users, there are some fixes for missing, misplaced and blank emails. Intermedia (News - Alert), a company that specializes in business cloud services for Microsoft Office users, recently published a blog post explaining how to handle the mysterious instances of email disappearance. In addition to offering tips to help Outlook users, the company also makes a strong case for using the cloud to avoid email issues.

According to Intermedia, when the body of a message disappears in Outlook or OWA, it’s generally caused by AVG or NOD32 antivirus software. The message initially arrives in the enterprise Exchange mailbox and is then synchronized with the user’s Outlook app. But when those common anti-virus clients are also installed as Outlook add-ins, they delete the message body within Outlook.

This also affects OWA since Outlook synchronizes mail across devices and platforms. Unfortunately, the fix for this issue is to remove the anti-virus add-in from Outlook, while nothing can be done to retrieve messages that have already disappeared.

An even better way to avoid these issues is to use a solution like Intermedia’s Office in the Cloud, which handles all the heavy lifting so users and on-site admins don’t need to worry about issues like disappearing emails. The suite includes Hosted Exchange, with 99.999 percent uptime, 24/7 support and unlimited email storage.

Intermedia offers businesses a worry-free experience that includes high levels of security in the company’s SOC 2-audited cloud. Services also include onboarding and migration from customer premises to the cloud as well as regulatory compliance with mandates like HIPAA, FINRA, SOX, GLBA and more. The company serves a number of industries including healthcare, legal, finance, manufacturing, construction and large enterprises.