Forum Discussion
This is the most recent version, but you made changes to another copy
I have the same problem with Outlook 2016 (Windows) and Office 365. This happens on various sent messages. Worse, if you click the "View the other versions of this item", Outlook loops, and opens many, many copies of the same message, though in draft form. Killing Outlook is the only way out.
BTW, no such message appears in my Drafts folder.
P.S. This has apparently been going on since August 2016 at least.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/outlook-not-saving-drafts-correctly/ea4be4a6-39bc-448d-8c51-d40f503ea949?page=1&auth=1
P.P.S. Sorry for multiple replies, but I seem to have discovered a solution of sorts. First, I compacted my mailbox, thinking that it might clean things up, or at least report if there were any corruption of the OST. That worked, and actually improved things, in that instead of many, many copies of one e-mail, Outlook only opened two. Then, trying to think of ways to get rid of the bogus items, I looked at the File menu for the bogus message, and noticed that in the "Move item to a different folder" button, it said the item was the in Conflicts folder. Aha! So, I opened the Conflicts folder via bottom left "..." and Folders / Sync issues, and deleted all copies of the message (actually, deleted everything in there).
That has cleared this up for me. It would be super-helpful of Outlook made it clear where this junk was coming from...
I clicked on that option and it started to pull up dozens of emails; ones I had been working on in the past when Outlook crashed on me. Before it finished pulling them up, however -- Outlook crashed.
My desire, then is to find out *WHERE* Outlook was keeping all of these messages, so that I could look at them and dispose of them individually.
The solution is to click on the ellipsis at the bottom of Outlook (Mail Calendar People Tasks Notes ...). In there I clicked on "Folders" and scrolled down to "Sync Issues" -> Conflicts.
I moved them into a "regular" folder, and I can now peruse them at my leisure.
