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Can someone fake an archived sent folder in Outlook? I have a screenshot showing someone's archived sent items and it shows an email I have never received. The headers on the columns also say "Received" instead of "Sent".

Can you fake that an email was sent? I have read that you can save the email then move the email into the Sent folder. Is this true?

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  • Email is NOT a guaranteed delivery method. E-mails CAN are ARE lost for any number of reasons. It seems to work 99.9% of the time, but it DOES happen that messages are lost. You want proof of sending/receipt, when the message is sent the sender needs to request a return receipt and/or a delivery reciept. Even then, whether they get one depends on the config of the server and whether the recipient chooses to send it. The only way you can truly know they received the message is if they reply to it.
    – Multiverse IT
    Nov 18, 2012 at 19:19

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Of course you can fake it. If you have control the desktop, then you can set it up any way you like, including with faked mails in Outlook.

Just how trivial that is depends on your goal.

But before you try this: Having an email in the 'sent' folder does not mean it has been sent. Even without trickery. It just means that Outlook tried to sent it. If it failed to do so (e.g. because you had no working network connection, or the server was flaky), then it still appears in the sent folder.

And even if everything worked as intended at your side, that does not mean the recipient received the mail. There is no guarantee on mail. Neither on email or paper-mail. You can test this if you want by posting a 1000 letters to people. In all likelihood a few will not arrive. Same for email.

(Please do not try this IRL unless you want to be marked as a spammer.)

Edit: Also see how-to-prove-that-an-email-has-been-sent.

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    Not necessarily true. If an Outlook email can't be sent for whatever reason (network hiccup, server outage, etc), it will appear in the Outbox and Outlook will continue to try to send it. It is true that you'll never know for sure. The "Received" instead of "Sent" sounds awfully dicey though.
    – trpt4him
    Nov 18, 2012 at 20:26

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