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I'm using Outlook 2010 with Exchange 2007.

I am moving emails from my Deleted Items folder to a user-created folder. When I move a "low" number of messages, say a few hundred or less, the operation completes successfully. When I move a "large" number of messages (in this example it's over 800) I get the message shown in the screenshot below.

If I click Yes, a new email is generated and has links to all the emails I selected in the Attachment field. When I cancel that email, not only have the messages not moved but they appear to be deleted entirely.

What does the message mean and why does it get presented?

Why does clicking Yes do the behavior I described above?

enter image description here

3 Answers 3

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I had this same problem yesterday and it has something to do with a calendar item in the folder you are trying to move the items from. I selected everything except for this calendar item and it worked fine without the error.

I deleted the calendar item and moved the remaining items to my archive folder.

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  • 2
    what I believe it's trying to do behind the scenes, is recreate those calendar events. But somehow thinks that they are all calendar events when it goes through the folder. Sounds like a bug in Outlook Mar 17, 2011 at 14:16
  • 2
    This behavior affects multiple versions of Outlook (for many years now). I typically sort by Icon in order to isolate the problem types, which include some other non-message types. I also want to know how can we move all of the items?
    – sage
    Jul 7, 2011 at 15:15
  • You can add "duration" field to the columns. Group by it and select only those items that have "none"
    – Alex S.
    Apr 26, 2023 at 8:36
  • support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/…
    – coz
    Oct 13, 2023 at 12:14
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Microsoft has provided official guidance relating to this issue: Moving multiple items from Deleted Items creates confusing warning about creating new items

It does indeed have to do with the fact that you are trying to move non-email message types (such as meeting requests etc.). Which, coincidentally happens when you are selecting more than 800 items at a time.

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This is such a strange behaviour that it could be said this actually is a bug in Outlook, persisting to version 2016 nonetheless. Perhaps it is deemed a low prioity by Microsoft, reason why it takes such a long time to fix.

Compounding the problem is that if you press "yes" in the diologue box that you show, there is no going back if you chose the "move" command (or just dragged e-mails from the folder to another folder). If there are a lot, Outlook freezes for a while and an e-mail gets created with the items as attachment. The items are lost of you don't save that e-mail. You can save all the attachments into a file system .msg file, but dragging and dropping them from a file system folder into Outlook opens up the same problem and the dialogue box appears again.

What's even worse, I think that some of the items that are movable are not created into an attachment but are actually moved (but then again not all of those), leading to a very inconsistent state of your items.

What I chose as a solution (after trying many other things, including some VBA script) is to keep the messages stored on the file system as .msg files, along with a readme file of where they are supposed to go and hope for a future bug fix by Microsoft, hopefull within a few years. Not much of a solution, but the only one that I am able to do right now. Every new major version I will try to import them again. I might update this answer if successful.

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  • 3 years later and still happening in Outlook 365 :(
    – NetMage
    Feb 2, 2022 at 20:27

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