Share via

Public Folders Tree and Shared Mailboxes Randomly Disappear for Some Users

  • Article

Question

Wednesday, April 8, 2020 8:15 PM

This seems to be a common issue, but I've never seen a permanent fix. Our environment is Exchange Server 2016 on-premise, around 600 mailboxes, and all clients are Outlook 2019 or Outlook 2016.

Randomly, a user here and there will report that the Public Folders tree and any shared mailboxes that they have permission to will disappear. We have also noticed that out-of-office and free/busy is also broken during this time. The usual fix that we use is to delete the user's Outlook profile and re-create. That will fix it for a number of days, weeks, or months. It seems to happen to most users, but is completely random.

Lately we have also had a few users that can see Public Folders when first opening Outlook, but it disappears after less than a minute. Even re-creating the Outlook profile does not fix these.

These are some of the things we have tried to fix both issues over the last couple years:

1.) Delete Outlook profile.

2.) Repair Office

3.) Re-isntall Office

4.) Switch between cached/online mode.

5.) We've checked autodiscover settings

6.) We've rebooted the Exchange server

7.) Checked ADSI Edit for old Exchange entries (none)

Anyone have a solution to this problem? Thanks in advance!

All replies (4)

Thursday, April 9, 2020 8:03 AM

Hi Josh,

Before we go on, I’d like to confirm the things below so that we can understand better about the situation:

  1. Does this problem occur randomly to “random” users?
  2. According to your description, the issue has been existent for some years, right? Have you made any significant change to the environment right before the issue started? By the way, the latest release for Exchange 2016 is CU16, if you are running an earlier version, it’s recommended to upgrade to Exchange Server 2016 CU16 to see if there is any improvement.
  3. Among the things you have tried so far, is there anything other than recreating the Outlook profile can temporarily fix the issue?
  4. By “out-of-office and free/busy is also broken during this time.”, could you please elaborate a bit more about the symptom or error so that we can do more research on this?

In addition, here are some more steps which might be helpful to troubleshoot the issue:

  1. Check in OWA to see if the missing Shared mailboxes and Public folders are visible. (You may need to manually add them to OWA first.) Also please check if OOF and free/busy works fine in OWA.
  2. Confirm if the problem is affecting users on both internal network and external network.
  3. Run “Test Email-AutoConfiguration” in Outlook, go through the test result to make sure all the URLs are correct.
  4. Test by moving a shared mailbox or public folder mailbox to a different database and see the result.
  5. Check if the disk that hold these shared mailboxes and public folders has enough free space.
  6. Try adding a missing shared mailbox as an additional mailbox in Outlook to see if any error message will prompt:

Any findings, please feel free to post back.

Regards,

Yuki Sun

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they helped. If you have feedback for TechNet Subscriber Support, contact [email protected].

Thursday, April 9, 2020 12:36 PM

Thank you for your response.

Here are some answers to your questions.

  1. Does this problem occur randomly to “random” users?   Yes, it seems to happen to pretty much everyone, but it is completely random and never at the same time as others.
  2. According to your description, the issue has been existent for some years, right? Have you made any significant change to the environment right before the issue started? By the way, the latest release for Exchange 2016 is CU16, if you are running an earlier version, it’s recommended to upgrade to Exchange Server 2016 CU16 to see if there is any improvement. I believe it has been happening ever since we moved to Exchange 2016 about 3 years ago. We have installed several CU updates since that time hoping that the issue would go away, but it has not. I will install CU16 when I have a maintenance window, but I have zero confidence that it will help. None of the other 15 did.
  3. Among the things you have tried so far, is there anything other than recreating the Outlook profile can temporarily fix the issue? No, a new profile is the only thing that works for us.
  4. By “out-of-office and free/busy is also broken during this time.”, could you please elaborate a bit more about the symptom or error so that we can do more research on this? OOF gives an error saying that the server is unavailable. No, free/busy information is displayed on other people's calendars. It just shows a blank calendar. After setting up a new profile both of these work again.

Responses to the things you said to try:

  1. Check in OWA to see if the missing Shared mailboxes and Public folders are visible. (You may need to manually add them to OWA first.) Also please check if OOF and free/busy works fine in OWA. Everything works fine in OWA. The problem exists only in Outlook.
  2. Confirm if the problem is affecting users on both internal network and external network. We only work from the internal network. We don't have external users.
  3. Run “Test Email-AutoConfiguration” in Outlook, go through the test result to make sure all the URLs are correct. We have looked at this in the past. URLs look correct. If there was an incorrect URL the problem would always exist.
  4. Test by moving a shared mailbox or public folder mailbox to a different database and see the result. I have tested moving both an affected user's mailbox and a shared mailbox. Neither seemed to help.
  5. Check if the disk that hold these shared mailboxes and public folders has enough free space. 30 GB free. Was over 100 GB free at the beginning of the issue.
  6. Try adding a missing shared mailbox as an additional mailbox in Outlook to see if any error message will prompt: This works fine. It only affects the auto mapping  of mailboxes.

Thank you

Friday, April 10, 2020 9:40 AM

Hi Josh,

Regarding the “Test Email-AutoConfiguration”, may I know if you have tried run it for an affected user and verified Autodiscover service was working fine by then?
Besides, please run the command below to get the internal url for Autodiscover, make sure the FQDN included in the url is pointing to the correct server. 

Get-ClientAccessService | fl Name,AutoDiscoverServiceInternalUri

By the way, do you happen to have a second nameserver? I read a thread which discusses an issue that shared mailboxes disappeared after opening Outlook. According to the op, the culprit was that their “second server hadn't had the DNS records updated to include the autodiscover settings & corrected mail server settings”. I’ll leave the link here for your reference: Shared inboxes disappearing after open Outlook 2016
(Please Note: Since the web site is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this information.)

Regards,

Yuki Sun

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they helped. If you have feedback for TechNet Subscriber Support, contact [email protected].

Thursday, April 16, 2020 7:57 AM

Hi Josh,

I am writing to check how things are going with this issue. Should there is anything else we can do to help, please don't hesitate to let us know.

Regards,

Yuki Sun

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they helped. If you have feedback for TechNet Subscriber Support, contact [email protected].