Blog: Outlook

I worked on a problem the other day in which a user with Outlook 2003 would search for an item in her inbox using a keyword in the subject of an email and the search results would come back empty even though you could clearly see items that should have been returned in her inbox. At first, I thought she just had a setting set incorrectly in her Outlook client, but after trying it with my mailbox, I saw the same behavior. I found the following powershell command VERY useful.

Test-ExchangeSearch –Identity <username>

This command inserts a test message containing a GUID into your mailbox and then searches for it to test the full text catalog. Both with accounts failed this test. Next, I tried to rebuild the index using using the following command.

ResetSearchIndex.ps1 <dbname> [more]

This command stops the MSExchangeSearch service, deletes the full text catalog and restarts the services (which then rebuilds the catalog). I found it interesting that the catalog folders and files were recreated, but the index files never grew. The catalogs for other databases/storage groups were gigs and this one was only 145 kilobytes after 2 hours which should have been plenty of time for the service to at least start crawling the database. I had tried everything I could find from google searches so I started reading through release notes for the Exchange 2k7 SP1 Update Rollup patches (there are currently 5 for SP1 and 7 for pre-SP1). I found fixes for indexing in three of them so I installed the latest one, SP1 Update Rollup 5 at the DR site and moved my mailbox. Everything worked. Moved it back and it was broken again. Pretty convincing. I installed the patch on all production Exchange servers and started another index rebuild. But, I saw behavior differently from I had seen before. When running the Test-ExchangeSearch command with no identity/username, it worked. When I used a real account it didn’t work. I also saw that the event logs said the index service was rebuilding the catalogs, but they were not increasing in size. Very strange…turns out that during a backup operation (which was running at the time when I did the second index rebuild operation), the search service will NOT start a database crawl. It waits until after the backup is done. The next day everything was running normal. Lesson learned…patch and be patient.

This is a followup to the November 18th post concerning limits on how many Outlook rules can be created.  The limit is actually on the amount of storage the active rules take up.  Exchange 2003 has a fixed limit of 32KB.  Exchange 2007 has a default limit of 64KB, but it can be increased to as high as 256KB.  This is specified as a mailbox attribute called RulesQuota and can be changed with the Set-Mailbox Exchange Management Shell command.  The Set-Mailbox command is documented at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123981.aspx

Here are examples that list the RulesQuota setting for each mailbox and set the quota for all mailboxes to 256KB. [more]

Get-Mailbox | ft DisplayName,RulesQuota

Get-Mailbox | Set-Mailbox -RulesQuota 256KB

And here is an example of how to set the RulesQuota on just one mailbox, conetrixuser’s, to 128KB.

Get-Mailbox | Where-Object {$_.Alias -eq "conetrixuser"} | Set-Mailbox -RulesQuota 128KB

There is a limit on how many rules you can create in Outlook.  This limit is actually based on how much space the rules take up.  The error message says “"There is not enough space on the Microsoft Exchange Server to store all of your rules", even though there is plenty of space on the drive, in the Exchange databases, etc.  According to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/241325, this is a limitation and applies to Exchange 5.0 through Exchange 2003 and Outlook 97 through Outlook 2002.  It looks like Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007 are not affected.  That article has a few (virtually useless) pointers on how reduce the amount of space the rules take up.

Note: There is a followup to this post that provides more details and instructions on how to increase the number of rules allowed in Exchange 2007.

Problem

The use of Outlook 2003 in an Exchange 2007 environment seems to result in the Out Of Office assistant being out of sync. Duplicate or old Out of Office replies are sent back to sender.

Cause

The duplicate OOF messages are sent because the legacy rule is enabled on an Exchange 2007 server - as well as the new EXCHANGE 2007 OOF rule(s).

When OOFAssistant see an interesting mapiEvent for a mailbox for the first time on an EXCHANGE 2007 server, it disables the legacy OOF rule.  After that, it does not disable the legacy OOF rule again (unless the user changes the OOF settings with OWA or Outlook 2007).

When an Outlook 2003 user turns on OOF for the very first time, it creates the legacy OOF rule (enabled).  When turning OOF off/on, Outlook 2003 leaves the legacy OOF rule in place and just changes a mailbox property to enable/disable OOF messages.  Thus, if something (say OOFAssistant) had disabled the legacy OOF rule, it remains disabled when Outlook 2003 turns OOF off and on.

The problem appears in the following situation also: [more]

• A mailbox is created on an EXCHANGE 2007 server.  OOFAssistant sees some interesting mapiEvent related to that mailbox.  OOFAssistant runs code to disable the legacy OOF rule, but since Outlook 2003 has not created one yet, OOFAssistant does nothing.
• The user turns on OOF with Outlook 2003 for the very first time.  Outlook 2003 creates the new legacy OOF rule (enabled).
• OOFAssistant processes the change to the legacy OOF rule by creating the new EXCHANGE 2007 OOF rule(s).
• Duplicate OOF messages are sent.

In addition, Out of Office replies can be corrupted by the Blackberry Enterprise server.

Solution

1. Install Microsoft Exchange 2007 SP1 - this update checks and disables the legacy OOF rule every time it encounters an interesting mapiEvent
2. and Blackberry enterprise Server 4.1.5 MR1 or later (refer to http://www.blackberryforums.com/bes-admin-corner/112250-out-office-oof-corruption-blackberry-bes-exchange-2007-a.html for an explanation of the blackberry issue that is resolved with the fix)

Other Workarounds

Workaround #1:

The problem is more likely a problem with OOF rules. OOF is actually a server side rule in user's mailbox. It may corrupt, or damaged. When this occurs, we run Outlook with the /cleanrules switch to clear out the rules and recreate the OOF rule, so everything will then come back normal.

Workaround #2:

1. Launch the MFCMapi tool.
2. Open the Mailbox of the affected user.
3. Right click on the Inbox folder and select Open Associated Contents Table.
4. Select the Message Class column and find the IPM.Rule.Message and IPM.Note.Rules.OofTemplate.Microsoft messages.
5. Before deleting the messages you can take backup of the template message the user had set for his OOF rule.
6. Delete these messages for the affected user.

Workaround #3:

Set up OOF through OWA 2007

Recently one of our clients was having problems viewing an image that was embedded (not a linked image) into an email. Other recipients of this same email and the image would display correctly. Where the image should have appeared, there was simply an outline of where the image should appear with a red X in the upper left hand corner of the image blank. After checking to make sure the Outlook security settings were configured to display images in emails, I discovered that the little known (and invisible) OutlookSecureTempFolder was ‘full’ and that by emptying it out, images would display correctly in the emails. Here’s the nitty-gritty of what was happening: [more]

When you open attachments/images directly from an email (as opposed to saving the attachments to another location then opening them from that location) within Outlook, a copy is written to a temporary folder referred to as the OutlookSecureTempFolder. This particular user’s folder was ‘full’ (although she still had plenty of disk space.)  The trick is that to regular users this folder is invisible (even if you’ve enabled the “Show Hidden Files and Folders” setting) and its name is randomly generated. In Outlook 2007 that randomly named directory resides by default at:

In Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.Outlook\ XXXXXXXX, where XXXXXXXX can be any random characters.

In Vista:
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\XXXXXXXX,  where XXXXXXXX can be any random characters.

To find (and change if you like) the location of this randomly generated folder path, look in the registry at: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Security\OutlookSecureTempFolder

Once you find that directory, you can simply type the path directly into Windows  explorer, delete the temp files that are there, and your emails will now begin to display images. Now you can see all of those oh-so-wonderful image-laden forwards that your grandmother sends you!  If you want to bump up your security and avoid this problem at the same time then take a look at our recommendation of automatically deleting Temporary Internet Files when you logoff/shutdown in a previous post.

For most people who are running Exchange, the combination of “Recover Deleted Items” and standard backups will be enough to restore most deleted emails. But what about when a user is using a PST file instead of an Exchange mailbox and they deleted an item from the Deleted Items folder? Instead of having to listen to a users agonizing sobs when you deliver the “I’m sorry, we tried everything we could but we were unable to save him” line, try the below ‘the gloves are off’ recovery method. [more]

A PST is essentially a database. Items are records within the database and there is an index that points to each item. When you empty the Deleted Items folder, Outlook doesn't actually delete the items, it just deletes the items' listings from the index. The item is still in the PST, but unrecoverable because Outlook has no idea where it is without the pointer in the index. The space the item takes up is called "whitespace".

When you Compact a PST, the item is finally removed permanently and the whitespace is recovered, often shrinking the PST by many megabytes. Once the PST has 20% "whitespace", Outlook begins compacting the PST. If the Deleted Items folder contained a lot of messages, Outlook may begin compacting the PST immediately and the items will be deleted forever within a few minutes.

To recover the items which are no longer in the index you need to force Outlook to rebuild the index by causing corruption. You can cause corruption by using a Hex editor to delete some characters from the beginning of the PST file. If you delete the wrong ones you'll cause corruption but not in the index and Outlook won't rebuild the index.

Recover the Deleted Items

Acquire a simple Hex Editor. I like XVI32 since it is simple and doesn’t require installation.

1. Open 'Outlook.pst' in the Hex editor.
2. Delete positions 7 through 13 with the spacebar. (On the right side of the screen if you are using XVI32) As you clear the characters, the editor displays the code “20” in their position. (On the left side of the screen if using XVI32.)
3. Save the PST, it is now corrupted.
4. Run the Inbox Repair Tool, SCANPST.exe, to recover the file. Use Windows Search utility to find it.
5. The Inbox Repair Tool creates a backup and repairs the damage and recreates the PST.
6. Open Outlook. The Deleted Items folder should now contain the deleted messages, unless Outlook has already deleted them for good by compacting the PST.
7. Enjoy your tickertape parade when you save the day with your techo-wizardry.

I was testing Symantec Endpoint Protection for a short while. After uninstalling endpoint protection I began receiving an error every time that I opened outlook. The error said something to the effect of “Unable to load Add-on please uninstall”.

In Outlook 2003 you should be able to simply remove the add-on within the add-on manager. In Outlook 2007 though it requires a different method. I had to delete a file called Extend.dat (location: C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook) which is the file that stores the cached add-ons. After running Outlook again this file was recreated but this time Outlook did not give me an add-on error.  This seems to apply to other add-ons as well. While searching the web I saw people report that this also works for similar errors after uninstalling AVG antivirus.

A task to have standard Outlook signatures started me on a Google search.  I found solutions for setting up the signature on each user’s computer for small companies as well as some applications for sale that would allow you to tweak Outlook for larger companies.  What I ended up doing was taking a snapshot of a VM machine before and after I applied the signature.  I then used WinInstall LE to find what changes occurred to the system between the before and after snapshot.  The actual signature is saved in three formats (html, rich text, and plain text) in %UserProfile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures.  A personal profile configuration file (*.pip) is also changed in Outlook called MSOut11.pip.  This file is located at %UserProfile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Office.  By modifying the three signature files for each user, and adding these files to the user’s profile, you can create a standard signature for anyone in a company. 

Disclaimer: This currently has only been tested in a terminal server environment running Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Office 2003.

The Out of Office Assistant in Outlook 2007 is a bit more helpful in letting people inside the company know where you are. Microsoft has included a “Inside My Organization” and “Outside My Organization” message area. For example, if I were to set an Out of Office message for both internal and external, it would look like this: [more]

 

Notice how I can also set the time range that the Out of Office Assistant is running.  This is a pretty nifty new feature for Outlook 2007.