Outlook won't remove Exchange Mailboxes: "This group of folders is associated with an email account. To remove the account...."

What a way to start the morning: Outlook added 25 account folders to my list of folders. (perhaps that's why it took four minutes to open.) Selecting a folder, then Right-click to close "Ted Kelly" brought up a message: "This group of folders is associated with an email account. To remove the account, click the File Tab, and on the Info tab click Account settings. Select the email account, and then click remove." (See image, below)  Problem solved!?!

It does not work -- there are no accounts with that name to remove.  A Microsoft Answer was not helpful.  What changed?

Well, this weekend we tested the latest build of our Exchange-to-Exchange migration tool.  I granted "Full Access" to several accounts to see how they migrated.  Hmmmmm.  I wonder if it's a feature from Exchange 2010 SP1:.... auto mapping of shared mailboxes to user’s Outlook 2010 profiles will remove a support headache.  Ok.  They swapped one headache and replaced with a migraine.

How do you un-automap the mailboxes?

Two ways:  

1. Use Exchange Management Shell Powershell to turn automapping false:

Add-MailboxPermission -Identity  -User  -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All -Automapping $false

2. Use ADSIedit to edit the MsExchDelegateListLinked attribute for that User Object, and remove .

Failed to remove additional account folders

Troubleshoot Outlook Connectivity in Exchange 2016 on-premises

We hit connectivity issues running Outlook 2016 on Exchange 2016 at least once a week.  Troubleshooting is difficult because of many platforms and technologies in play. 


A recent blog post from the Microsoft Exchange Team titled "Checklist for troubleshooting Outlook connectivity in Exchange 2013 and 2016 (on-premises)" promises to help us figure it out.  There wasn't a check list, per se.  Rather it was an organized collection of troubleshooting tips and techniques. We hope it helps us and helps you.  (Note: this is NOT intended for Office 365 connectivity issues!)




First, here are examples of the connectivity problems they cite, and we've hit:

Clients prompting for credentials (intermittently or continuously)

Clients getting disconnected

Clients are unable to establish a connection

Clients freezing or going unresponsive

Here is a summary of their tips and recommendations:


* Ensure that everything is fully patched.  We find Office Configuration Analyzer Tool (OffCAT) quite helpful.  In fact, Microsoft Office released OffCat Version 2.2 June 2016.  Download v2.2 here.


* They recommend cached mode vs. online mode to smooth out the user experience.  We agree it helps, although it masks connectivity problems.


* Ensure CAS servers are not turning off NIC cards, use outdated drivers, or are not configured for power saving mode.  The same holds true for the load balancer -- make sure keep-alive and idle timeouts are set above the 15 minute threshold.


* Too many cores:  it's hard to believe that you can have too many cores, but you can.  Don't have any more than 24 cores per server


* Configure Exchange performance monitoring ("perfwiz").  MS points you to two articles:  Troubleshoot High CPU Utilization in Exchange 2013, and Exchange Monitoring tool, "Exmon"


* Logs: The article recommends Outlook logging, HTTP logging, IIS logging, Exchange Logging, and RPC logs.  They recommend a tool, Log Parser Studio, to help parse the logs.




Writing this blog was the easy part.  Now we'll have to try each suggestion until we discover what's causing the client connectivity problems.

Responses from external meeting attendees not appearing in Outlook tracking

Be aware -- responses from external meeting attendees are not appearing in Outlook tracking.

KB28810011 will mess with your Outlook 2013

From Tony Redmond:   Update causes Outlook 2013 to fail to open archive mailboxes.

Arm yourselves with knowledge.

Human Resource Conference Room Bookings as Indicators of Impending Doom

If you follow this blog you probably also know as the New York Times puts it, A Large Round of Layoffs Is Expected at Microsoft.

This is the key sentence "Human resources managers have begun reserving conference rooms for most of Thursday, most likely a sign that they will be used to meet with laid-off employees..."

Now HR and Conference Rooms is almost never a good combination. I flash back to my days at Lotus (pre-IBM), when the only thing worse than a group meeting with HR was a group meeting with HR with a few dozen donuts -- translation: "re-organization time!".

What I find interesting is that the conference room bookings are the most direct and compelling evidence.

Microsoft folk, if you wanted to get really subtle in your analysis of your future chances, just use Outlook to look for free time in the conference room YOUR corporate mouthpiece.... er.... Human Resources Manager... uses.

The Curious Case of the Outlook 2013 Contact Notes

UPDATE 9/4/14: Microsoft released a fix for this issue. See our Disappearing Contact/Calendar item body fixed in Exchange 2013 CU6 blog post


Found something weird with Outlook 2013.

This showed up in our Beehive to Exchange migration but it would not be limited to that particular situation.

Let's look at the results first.  All of these clients were accessing the exact same contact record on our Office 365 test system, though we have confirmed the same behavior with Exchange on-premises as well (no surprise there since this looks to be an Outlook 2013 bug).

Contacts and Notes (including some data we capture to the contact notes either because of EWS bugs or there's no other place to put it) show up fine in Outlook 2007 post-migration.

And they show up fine in Outlook 2010.

OWA and the Surface are no problem.

THEN we get to Outlook 2013:

PROBLEM!  Where did the Notes go?  The situation seems to only show up if you have a contact created using EWS.

This gets weirder because you can CREATE a contact with notes in either OWA or Outlook 2013 and it will properly display and edit in either.

This gets EVEN WEIRDER because in Outlook 2013 you get Notes displayed correctly in the PEOPLE view....

but not in any other view (Business Cards for example):

We think this is fairly definitive proof that Outlook 2013 has a bug in it.

Fully automating an #MDaemon to #MSExchange 2013 migration

One of our customers wanted to migrate from MDaemon to Exchange in stages (vs our typical "big bang".)  A staged migration is more delicate.  It requires you configure (and then re-configure) active directory accounts and Exchange mailboxes pre- and post- migration.  It's not hard, just a lot of steps. This called for a script!  And so, we did.

We have successfully field-proven that an MDaemon to Exchange 2013 on-premises migration can be fully scripted.

We're going to outline our approach:

First some background on the main show: email and calendars: 

• For email we used and recommend imapsync.  It's an excellent, effective, and efficient product.
• For calendars, tasks, contacts, and distribution lists we wrote our own application.

But a full migration methodology has to include more than just moving the data.

So before any email or calendars are migrated we take care of:

• Reading the MDaemon user list (and passwords)
• Provisioning users -- first as Exchange contacts, then as mail-enabled users
• Re-configuring Outlook to point to your Exchange server and removing the MDaemon Outlook Sync. (Note: there are publicly available scripts.  But we found they don't work. After hours of debugging, we gave up and wrote our own.)
• Pre- and Post-cut over scripting so that legacy emails are moved to the target system, and new emails redirected to the target system.

If you have a few dozen users, it's difficult to make this cost-effective and you might as well do it on your own  (Hint:  you can export PSTs from MDaemon, then import those PSTs into Exchange.)  Tedious and time-consuming, yes, but free.  This assumes your time is worth less than the cost of third-party migration tools.  If it takes as long to just DO it (apologies to Nike) as it does to deploy a third-party customized method, just do it.

If you have several hundred users and want to license our tools and methods, you can contact us.

Transferring Palm Desktop Calendar and Contacts Data

Palm Pilots.  

There's nostalgia for you.  

But apparently the data can live on in their Desktop app.

The New York Times had an article on Transferring Old Palm Desktop Data (to Outlook) that is worth having around in case you find yourself in that situation.

Needless to say this is client-to-client.

Must Read: Tips for Working Faster in Microsoft Outlook.

The folks at Lifehacker did a fantastic article on 12+ Tips and Tricks to Work Faster in Microsoft Outlook.

Read it and pass it along to everyone else in your organization.

It's about time ... Outlook 2013 7 Day Preview is back!

It's about time (a calendaring geek's favorite expression) Microsoft fixed this issue!

I was very pissed that Outlook 2013 RTM no longer showed "future" appointments in the ToDo bar. I was thrilled to learn it's available -- see Microsoft's KB# 2837618. 

And now for the really good news:  The patch causes Outlook 2013's IMAP folders to fail to synchronize.  I'm thrilled to see my appointments 7 days out, but even more pissed that I can't get new mail sent to my inbox, or preventing me from setting up OOF messages. 

InfoWorld said it better than I could in a recent article: Botched Outlook 2013 patches KB 2837618 and KB 2837643 break Out Of Office reply, Free/Busy, and more. InfoWorld found a detailed synopsis of the issue, written by Matthew Stublefield from Missouri State University.

Bottom line: DO NOT apply this patch until Microsoft figures out how to fix the fiasco.