A message you were expecting never arrived

Someone says they sent you an email and it is not in your inbox. Before asking them to send it again, there are several places it may be sitting. Working through them in this order finds most missing messages in a couple of minutes.

Junk Email

Open the Junk Email folder. Filters are cautious, and a first message from a new contact or one with an attachment can end up here. If you find it, right-click it and choose Not junk, which moves it back and teaches the filter. Add the sender to your safe senders if you expect more.

Focused and Other

If your inbox has Focused and Other tabs, check Other. Outlook sorts newsletters and anything it thinks is low priority there, and it gets it wrong sometimes. Right-click a message and choose Move to Focused, and choose "Always" if you want that sender in Focused from now on. You can also switch Focused Inbox off entirely in settings.

Quarantine

Microsoft 365 holds messages it considers dangerous, such as those with suspicious attachments or links, in a quarantine outside your mailbox. Depending on your settings, you may receive a daily summary email listing quarantined messages, with a button to request release. If you do not, ask us to check the quarantine for you; we can see it and release a legitimate message. Please do not release something just because you want it: if a message about an invoice or a shared file was quarantined, that is often a sign it was not genuine.

Rules and folders

An inbox rule may be moving messages automatically. In Outlook, look under Rules (in Settings, Mail, Rules on the web) for anything you did not create. A rule you do not recognize that moves or deletes mail is a warning sign of a compromised account; stop and read Think your account has been hacked? and call us.

Search everywhere

Use the search box and change the scope from the current folder to All mailboxes or All folders. Search for the sender's address rather than a word from the subject.

It was never sent, or bounced

Ask the sender to check their Sent folder and whether they received a bounce. If they did, ask them to forward it to you and send it on to hello@bitlogix.tech; it tells us exactly what happened. If the message is from a system, such as a password reset or an order confirmation, check that the address on your account there is spelled correctly.

Still missing

Email hello@bitlogix.tech with the sender's address, the approximate time it was sent and the subject if you know it. We can trace a message through Microsoft 365 and see whether it arrived, was filtered, was quarantined or never reached us at all.