Tech Blog

Had a very weird issue where users on prem couldnt access mailboxes for users online even though the permissions were correct.

The error was:

Cannot expand the folder. The set of folders cannot be opened.

Had a good google and the recommendations were to do the following which didnt work for me:

Connect to 365 and run:

#remove permissions
Remove-MailboxPermission -Identity Manager@bohemiangrove.co.uk -User User1@bohemiangrove.co.uk -AccessRights FullAccess

#Add permissions
Add-MailboxPermission -Identity Manager@bohemiangrove.co.uk -User User1@bohemiangrove.co.uk -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All -AutoMapping:$false

So what I did to fix this was to add this for

1. Exit Outlook.
2. Start Registry Editor. To do this, use one of the following procedures, as appropriate for your version of Windows:
3. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Exchange
4. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
5. Type AlwaysUseMSOAuthForAutoDiscover, and then press Enter.
6. Right-click AlwaysUseMSOAuthForAutoDiscover, and then click Modify.
7. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
8. Exit Registry Editor.

So had a bunch of errors on my Exchange 2010 server today, namely:

Event ID 9646 MSExchangeIS

Mapi session "cd83bc42-1bff-459e-9db2-558cc68478b9" exceeded the maximum of 500 objects of type "objtFolder".

The error doesn’t give much away but basically what its saying is:

A user with GUID “ccd83bc42-1bff-459e-9db2-558cc68478b9” has more than 500 open folders in a single session, because exchange only allows 500 open folder connections (for a cached mailed) at a time its going to screw with the user and in our case not automatically update the users folders in Outlook 2010.  Please note this is different from open MAPI connections to the mailbox.

Note this has been edited with help from Mark Daley who stated:

the objtfolder is an ‘Open Item Limit’ ie the limit of the number of folders that are being opened in a single session, not the number of connections being made to the mailbox which is a session limit See (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff477612(v=exchg.141).aspx). This limit is the total for the session so if a user has 250 folders in their own mailbox and say 300 in a shared mailbox then the limit will be breached. The other thing that should be explained in that this is only likely to occur when the mailboxes are cached (shared and non-shared) as it is the consequence of caching that is causing the limit to be breached because each folder is opened / counted during the mailbox sync process. Therefore turning off caching mode for either the primary mailbox or just the shared mailbox is another fix for this issue.

You may be wondering how a user could have more than 500 connections, well in our case the user had two mailboxes attached to their own mailbox and all the folders (inbox, outbox etc) together added up to more than 500 folders.

You can scan a mailbox with Power Shell to determine the number of folders:

Get-MailboxFolderStatistics USER1@BohemianGrove.co.uk | Sort-Object ItemsInFolder -Descending | ft Name, FolderPath > C:\temp\countFolders.csv

So lets say you see the errors on your Exchange 2010 server but don’t know who’s having the issue, you find Users MAPI GUID’s by running the following Power Shell command:

get-mailbox -Resultsize Unlimited | ft Name,ExchangeGuid -AutoSize > c:\temp\msExchMailboxGuid.txt

Once you know who the user is what can you do, well there’s four options in my mind:

1) Tell the user to re-organise the folder structure,

2) Remove some of the extra Mailboxes from a users mail profile if possible (you could add a extra profiles to Outlook, making Outlook prompt on start up),

3) Do not cache the mailbox in Outlook or simply do not cache the additional mailbox in Outlook.

4) Change Exchange 2010 to allow more than 500 folder to be open at a single time for cached mailboxes!

To proceed with 4) you’d need to do the below but be warned if large quantities of users connected with plus of 500 folders your server performance will suffer drastically:

Log onto all your mailbox servers and create the following registry key:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Expand the following registry subkey:
   \\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\ParametersSystem
3. Right-click ParametersSystem, point to New, and then click Key.
4. Type MaxObjsPerMapiSession, and then press ENTER to name the new sub key.
5. Right-click MaxObjsPerMapiSession, click New, and then click DWORD Value.
6. Enter the object type as specified in the event description, and then press ENTER.
7. Right-click the object type that you entered, and then click Modify.
8. In the Value data box, type the number of objects to which you want to limit this entry, and then click OK.

Did you know you can automatically assign calendar entries colours (notice how colours is spelt the correct British way) and categories.

I.e. say you have set a meeting called “Project Bob” and that meeting and any future meeting with words “Project” and “Bob” in to be set a specific colour in your calendar, well here’s how:

Open your Outlook Calendar

Click the View Menu item

Click the “View Settings” button under Current View

Click the “Conditional Formatting” button

Click the “Add” button to create a new rule for auto-colouring appointments

Enter the name of the rule in the “Name:” text box e.g. Project Bob

Select a colour in the “Colour:” drop down list box (I like green)

Click the “Condition…” button to identify the conditions under which this colour should be applied

Select the “Appointments and Meetings” tab and enter a keyword into the “Search for the word(s):” text box to look for a word in the Subject field

Click OK to all screens,

You should see the changes straight away.

I had a replace a PC for a user today who’s email was hosted externally.

So after I replaced the PC I came to setup Outlook, checked the old PC and saw the following setup:

What on earth is

iC Exchange I think to myself!! Check the config:

What are these settings, I’ve never seen the like before!!!

So what do I do?!?  Well the Server must be accessible from the internet so after a bit of playing the server was accessible from http://mail.EXCHAGESERVER.co.uk and using some provided credentials I could logon!!

Once I logged on I realised I wasn’t looking at Exchange I was look at VMware Zimbra!!  I’ve never heard of this and watching the promotional video they said Exchange was legacy so I immediately decided they were stupid!!

Well reading about I found I needed a Outlook connector which I could download from any server running VMware Zimbra!!

So went to:  http://mail.EXCHAGESERVER.co.uk/Downloads/

Downloaded the client, installed and used some provided credentials!! BAM done.

What a week!

So Monday comes along and we get a few users complaining that they couldn’t turn off their Out Of Office.  So after a bit of head scratching I managed to turn it off by doing the following:

–       Downloaded MFCMapi.exe
–       In the main window choose;
–       Session-> Logon and Display Store Table
–       Select the Outlook mail profile to logon to when prompted.
–       You’ll now see a list of your configured message stores in your mail profile.
–       Select your mailbox by looking at the Display Name column.
–       In the pane below, some properties will get loaded.
–       Look at the Property Name(s) column and select the entry called;
PR_OOF_STATE
–       When you look at the Value column for this property, you’ll see it is now set to True.
–       Double click the entry to disable the check box in front of “Boolean”.
–       Press OK to close the dialog.
–       Log off your session via;
–       Session-> Logoff (thanks to MSOutlook.info)

Now this worked but oddly enough, it kept happening for more users.

During the day a few other users complained that when they email a meeting request to a room the room the request doesn’t get processed by the room and the meeting doesn’t get booked.

So after a think, I started to wonder if maybe this was a issues with our Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Assistant and the Active Directory Topology Service on our Mailbox Server..

So that evening I did a quick restart of the services…nothing.

So next I tried a trusty server reboot of both our Hub Transport / Client Access and our Mailbox server…nothing!

At this point I’m mildly panicking! So as a methodical thinker,

–       I created a new user and tested OOF – Broken.
–       Tried to repair the user with:

    New-MailboxRepairRequest -Mailbox Test1.Account@targetgroup.com CorruptionType,SearchFolder,AggregateCounts,ProvisionedFolder,FolderView

–       Moved the user to another Mailbox Database – IT WORKS!!!
–       Moved the Room to another Mailbox Database – IT also Works!!

So it looks like the Database is knackered!  Well I guess I could move all the users to another Database but that would ruin my DAG so I’d rather not! So what’s my other option, repair the database I guess and look for any broken mailboxes!

First things first, back up the Database, thank you Veeam!

Then ran the following via PowerShell:

New-MailboxRepairRequest -Database "MY-DATABASE" -CorruptionType ProvisionedFolder,SearchFolder,AggregateCounts,Folderview

And kept an eye on the event viewer for the following:

10059- A database-level repair request started.
10047- A mailbox-level repair request started.
10048- The mailbox or database repair request completed successfully.
10059- A database-level repair request started.
10062- Corruption was detected. View the repair log details to see what the corruption type was and if it was repaired.
The following is an example of the information you would get if the repair request detected and repaired a mailbox with event ID 10062 – Corruptions detected during online integrity check for request 321c88e0-0ad2-4e15-b93b-197a94efd1bd
Mailbox:C51AB7C3-9EB7-40C9-AAC6-953FD084AF59
Database:MBD01
Corruption Is fixed FID Resolution
Folder BacklinksYes1c7c-BC72D267870102Update
Folder Aggregate CountYes1c7c-BC72D267870102Update

So after I ran this, I found absolutely no faulty mailboxes which made me worry that this repair had done a sum total of nothing!!

But Wham, it all seems to be working!!

Oddly enough the following week another Database on another site started doing the same the thing but again a database repair sorted the issue…again though finding no faulty mailboxes.

Hope this helps someone else.

As we used to use some awful hosted Exchange 2003 platform we decided the first thing to be moved was Exchange…. So as all the users were on a separate domain we created a lavish Exchange 2010 platform and used linked mailboxes for everyone and migrated the mail!! Think I posted on how we did this earlier…basically created the linked mailboxes via PowerShell and a CSV file then ExMerge the mail out of Exchange 2003 and used a PowerShell import command to pull the mail in (although you could use new PST Capture tool now to import which provides a pretty GUI).

So here we are, linked mailboxes as far as the eye can see, full of crappy mail!

Next we setup Auto Discover on all our domains to point to exchange and bobs your uncle.

So, everyone is working away…and suddenly people start complaining they keep getting prompted for their username and password credentials  in Outlook 2010 running Windows 7!

Ok I think, you’d expect it once or twice due to going cross domain but not 20 or 30 times!!

The Fix, after trying everything we discovered it was down to AutoDiscover and it not being routed internally!

Added it (it being AutoDiscover.Domain.com) to the proxy exclusion list in IE and wham! No more prompts!

MsiExec /p \\Server\share\office\Features.MSP /qn

@Echo off
REM *********************************************************************
REM Install Extra Features for Office
REM *********************************************************************

MsiExec /p \\Server\share\office\Features.MSP /qn

REM Stick a pause in if you need to trouble shoot!!
REM Pause

End