The act of discarding a message that does not exist must therefore do one of two things. It may cause the message contents to also cease to exist. Alternately, it might not affect the existence but only the accessibility of message contents. Perhaps they continue to exist, but discarding the message (which already did not exist) causes the copy operation to cease being invokable on the message contents (even though they do continue to exist). The story of existence has many mysteries.
↫ Mark J. Nelson
The one question that can really break my brain in a way that is feels like it’s physically hurting – which it can’t, because, fun fact, there’s no pain receptors in the brain – is the question what exists outside of the universe? Any answer you can come up with just leads to more questions which just lead to more questions, in an infinite loop of possible answers and questions that the human mind is not equipped to grasp.
Anyway, it turns out using Outook can lead to the same existential crises.
If we were talking about one instance, It is indeed preposterous. In some ways it reminds me of Schrödinger’s cat. But in terms of outlook 365 I’m going to guess this happens because the message is deleted on the server and no longer exists there, but the message was downloaded on the client where it still exists. It may be out of sync due to concurrent sessions.. Further operations on the message at the server cannot work because it’s gone, but as long as the client still has a copy, you can still copy the contents from there.
They forced office 365 on us at work. Now most are quitting volountarily. So it is a good strategy to reduce the work force at least.
I’ve written similar messages before. Totally clear as mud unless you’ve been there. A possible alternative, is to revive the message on the server by saving this, which may be what was desired, but whomever deleted the message on the server, might be very confused if its brought back form the dead. And troubleshooting its un-death is difficult. Here, they just chose to prevent un-death, which is fine I guess.
Very much in the spirit of the classing windows error message “Not enough space left on C: drive to delete file:”
Maybe the author is onto something here and Outlook IS a probabilistic system convergent enough to project the appearance of coherence from the outside. It would explain a lot of weird support calls I got from my time at the support desk.
Mythology is fun
The author (and/or Microsoft) should have studied dracology; specifically “The Dragons of Probability” by Stanisław Lem, because Dragons face a similar problem: They all do ofcourse not exist, but they do not exist in different ways (there are null dragons, negative dragons, and imaginary dragons), and the mathematics of dragons may make them appear under certain circumstances.
Maybe messages are kind-of dragons?
SCNR
So I’m assuming the message concerned was already deleted, and trying to be recovered, but that a retention policy is in place resulting in the poorly worded ambiguous notification. In effect the record of the message exists but the body is long gone.