The officials from Microsoft, after several complaints from users, confessed that the company's product, entitled Live OneCare security suite, accidentally has been erasing all messages of those that use whether Outlook or Outlook Express. The company's forum concerning OneCare included postings that state the cause of the message deletion.
Users found out that their e-mails were deleted by an antivirus program. It supposed to delete messages that contained malware attachments but besides doing its main job the antivirus whether quarantined or sometimes even erased all .pst or dbx files.
One user left a comment on Microsoft's OneCare forum saying that in case there is no way to recover the erased messages it would mean that Microsoft developed a program that caused damage more than any other virus in 30 years of user's activity in the field of computing.
However, the postings on the forum show that there is a way to recover some .pst or dbx files but only if those are available in the program's quarantine facility. This means that the erased files cannot be recovered; only those that were sent to quarantine might still be available.
Microsoft's forum administrator, Stephen Boots, left a comment on the forum saying that he was quite unhappy with the issue. He said that this problem was reported over a year ago and though the issue was fixed in the 1.0 release and it never appeared in the beta version but it did in the new 1.5 release.
In a Computerworld statement, the spokesperson of the software giant outlined that the company is fixing the problem of the antivirus that mistakenly deleted the .pst files of Outlook and the .dbx files of Outlook Express when it spotted an infected attachment in an e-mail. The spokesperson also mentioned that the updated version of OneCare will be released on March 13.
Screenshot of Live OneCare running on Windows Vista.
Microsoft’s officials admitted that the company’s Windows Live OneCare security suite has been accidentally deleting e-mails of those users that worked with Outlook and Outlook Express.

Microsoft’s OneCare forum included postings that stated the cause of message deletion. Thus the issue occurred thanks to an antivirus application that finds e-mails containing viruses. The problem with the software was that the antivirus, instead of deleting or quarantining the hazardous e-mail, deleted all messages from the personal folder.

The forum, however, gave hope in a post saying that some messages might be recovered but only in case they were quarantined. Thus users are able to find those e-mails in OneCare’s quarantine facility.

The administrator of the forum, Stephen Boots, outlined that he was very unhappy with the issue which, he said, appeared over a year ago and the company thought it fixed the problem with the release of 1.5 version. Boots said that the beta version of the program worked fine but when the final version was launched the problem occurred once again. 

According to the statement, reported by the spokesperson of the software giant, Microsoft is now working to fix the problem and release an updated version of OneCare on March 13.

OneCare was criticized after it failed to pass an independent test of security products that provided a certain certification. In addition to this the program did not provide enough protection for Windows Vista users.