Here is my sad story…

1. Exchange goes corrupt…. be frightened of running out of space with virtualization :-)
2. We go back to a backup a 3-4 days old :-(
3. Outlook (the ‘smart’ client) connects…. it sees that the server doesnt have the emails that it has… so it proceeds to quickly and violently delete hundreds of emails, from the last few days.
4. Everybody is not happy

Why doesn’t Outlook not work better? It could say.

Since you last connected, 356 emails have been deleted from ‘Inbox’ on the server.
Do you want these emails to be deleted on your PC? [DELETE]
Do you want to put your emails onto the server? [UPLOAD]

Is there a downside to this? I can’t think of anything….

(with this feature, outlook would not just be a copy, it could be included into disaster recovery plans)