What happens when you think too complex...

Being with an escalated support team is fun.. people aren't satisfied unless you follow your statement with a
root cause..

One ground rule: Things can't fail for simple reason.. It has to be something really complex about the failure.. about the behaviour..

However, at times complex thinking proves too expensive. Here is what happened today.

My team lead started experiencing a very strange issue with his mail client. When ever he forwards an email to any one, it is lost from his inbox view.. He figured out that under an option called "All Documents" his mails were safe.. He was concerned so were we..

An immediate quick meeting was called and action items were charted

• Take the back up of the mail data base


• To do that, get an alternate laptop, configure it for back to back connection and dump the data on to it.


• Our lotus notes expert wanted to try a "Design" replace option to see if any of the "Templates" were corrupt. Once the back up was completed, he was  to try that.

Backup went fine. We assembled back to discuss the strategy further.

I thought something related to "Automatic Inbox Cleaning"  agent was playing the trick. Opened the backend script and tried to see if I could find something interesting..

With my halfcooked knowledge, I have enlightened the whole team about the possibility of an automatic inbox cleaning up happening and why it did not happen on my system and why it didn't happen to my lead last week and.......

We took control of the impacted system again.. Asked our lead to test it once again before we were game for the big operation.. Alas.. The issue repeated.. So we called operation mail client "START"

Meanwhile, our only sensible team mate ( at least for the moment) decided to hit the "Insert" button, which is for marking an email "read". To our surprise, that mail too vanished.

He then took the mouse control... Selected a small menu on the right hand top corner.. which initially read " VIEW UNREAD MAILS ONLY"..

He changed it to "VIEW ALL MAILS" and everthing was back to normal..

The whole team was dumb for few moments.. which was followed by uncontrollable laughter..

Sometimes.. it helps if you dont think too complex.. :-)

Cheers guys...