Overdue Task Notifications being Sent Even Though Workflow was stopped.

A user had started a regular out-of-the-box approval workflow and then decided she did not need the document that the workflow was running on, so she deleted it. A week later, she received an overdue task notification for that document. She figured it just needed time to clear out of the system, so she didn’t say anything to IT. A week went by and she got another notice. She then deleted the entire library – and still the emails kept coming. It was puzzling – the workflow was stopped, yet overdue email notifications were still being sent to workflow participants.


She called me after moving her documents and deleting the site, and still the workflow task notifications kept coming. I was puzzled. After numerous hours spent Googling and frantically trying to eke out an answer on the internet, I remembered something I should have thought of.

We had performed a restore for that site collection a month before (probably why I did not remember it – I can barely remember what I had for breakfast by noon). The restore was placed in a live environment that we use for troubleshooting user issues.

I browsed to the site and sure enough, there was the document, document library and a workflow labeled “In Progress.” Because it was not in a dev environment, it was running SMTP in our production environment and was hosting the workflow as if it existed in the original location.

After I discovered this, I found a couple more instances from other users that had this issue. So apparently, I am not alone. Good thing too – in SharePointLand, alone can be scary!