A Room or Room List disappears from Outook Scheduling Assistant

This case is really cool, and on a first look it looks like there is some magic involved. Help desk support engineer has escalated a situation with a "problematic" user mailbox and outlook. Whenever this user has been scheduled a meeting in a room or room list, the scheduled room(s) automatically disappears from the scheduling assistant list in a few seconds. It sounds like magic, and I've checked with my outlook, and I couldn't believe my eyes how room(s) disappears automatically in a few seconds when this users was scheduled a meeting and meeting room(s).
So, I've started digging the properties of this users mailbox and bumped on following invalid configuration :

WorkingHoursStartTime and WorkingHoursEndTime were having invalid time set. Changing these values to correct time settings can be done using the Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration. For example:

Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration - identity "affected user" -WorkingHoursStartTime 08:00:00

Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration -Identity "affected user" -WorkingHoursEndTime 17:00:00

After changing these values to regular working hours, the magical disappearance of the meeting room(s) has ended when this user was also scheduled.

There is also published support article from Microsoft about this phenomenon on https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/2852702/a-room-or-room-list-disappears-in-scheduling-assistant . It's stated that Exchange online is affected, but in my case I have experienced with Exchange on premise.

Happy Scheduling :)

Outlook PST Cannot Be Accessed - Error 0x80040116

In this case, a friend of mine has complained to me that suddenly he couldn't access his emails stored in personal folder file (.pst) on his Outlook. He didn't have a valid backup copy of his Outlook personal folder file, and Outlook was returning error 0x80040116.

Before getting into resolution of the problem, let's first answer the question: What is personal folder file (.pst)? Well, the .pst file is a database file. So, like every other database file, it may become corrupt if not handled properly.

According from Microsoft KB319128, this error is related with disk problem and possible .pst corruption. From MSDN library and List of Extended MAPI numeric result codes, it can be seen that this error is disk related. So, running the chkdsk /r ( option /r locates bad sectors and recovers readable information ), has fixed several bad sectors on his hard disk . Fortunately, there were few bad sectors and hdd was small, so scanning the disk took around an hour and so.
After finishing the chkdsk scan, he tried to access his emails, and still no joy, error 0x80040116 was still present. So, now it was time to fix the pst file. For fixing the .pst files there are two options:

• Native (out of the box) Office ScanPST.exe
• Third Party solution for recovering PST files. There are tons of these solutions and I can recommend Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST Repair

For more information on how to repair pst file using scanpst.exe please follow the official Microsoft article How to repair your Outlook personal folder file (.pst)

In case of severe damage of .pst where scanpst.exe will not help, it's worth of trying Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST Repair. Demo version is free for downloading, and you can repair the corrupt .pst file and preview the recoverable items in it. If you get satisfied with the results, you can purchase the full version and save the recovered files. For more info regarding this product please checkout the official page Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST Repair.

So, what can we learn from this case is very simple, it's been said and written million of times and that is: Always perform regular backup of your valuable data.

Outlook search "Something went wrong and your search couldn't be completed"

In this case it's mine workstation with latest updates installed, and my first day after vacation with plenty of sun, beach, sand and sea. I was trying to get myself into working mode, so started with searching from tons of unread emails. (Un)fortunately, Outlook responded with "Something went wrong and your search couldn't be completed" .

After checking the application event log there was a warning event from Outlook source with id 36 and description:

Search cannot complete the indexing of your Outlook data. Indexing cannot continue ...(
error=0x81404005)

I thought my ost file got corrupted, so I've deleted the ost file and Outlook has recreated the ost file, but my Outlook search still couldn't be completed.
Fortunately, my internet browser search was working and found the Microsoft published article of known outlook issues after installation of latest June 2017 updates https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Outlook-known-issues-in-the-June-2017-security-updates-3f6dbffd-8505-492d-b19f-b3b89369ed9b . My issue is described as issue #5, with workaround of disabling the indexing.


There is a announcement that today 27/6/17 there will be Windows update fix for this issue.
So, until the fix is published, disable the Outlook indexing with steps described as workaround in the article, or do not try to search :)

Missing rule in Outlook

In this case, scheduled meetings to a user were mysteriously forwarded to a group of users. Helpdesk engineers have removed all the rules that could be seen for that user mailbox, and again all scheduled meetings for that user were again forwarded to this particular group of users. Helpdesk team escalated this user issue to Exchange admins in order to do same tracking. And from Exchange tracking logs can be seen that scheduled meetings were forwarded by mailbox rule ?!?!? :

But, where is that rule ? Get-InboxRule for this user mailbox returned nothing, because helpdesk engineers have removed all the rules, and still there is a rule in this user mailbox that is forwarding the scheduled meetings. So, obviously there is a rule corruption for this user mailbox, and MFCMAPI is your friend. Latest version of this tool can be downloaded from codeplex http://mfcmapi.codeplex.com/ .


Please follow this article https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/hkong/2015/02/27/how-to-delete-corrupted-hidden-inbox-rules-from-a-mailbox-using-mfcmapi/ , to learn how to delete corrupted rules with this very powerful tool.


After deleting this corrupted rule from the user mailbox, no other scheduled meetings were forwarded from this user to the particular group of users.


And again, please be very careful when using MFCMAPI in order to avoid corruption.

Outlook 2013 gets Contacting the server for information ...

In this case some Outlook 2013 users were complaining that sometimes their favorite email client was going into non responsive state, whenever they were replying to some email message. The Outlook 2013 was not responding with following message:

Contacting the server for information ...

They all had in common, that they were replying to same external contact with faulty picture (icon) in his(her) signature, even though Automatic Download Outlook settings were set not download pictures.
One way to resolve this behavior was to ask this external contact to change this faulty signature, but this was not an option.
Another way to resolve this situation was to change the email formatting when replying to emails to this contact into plain text, but this option is available only when email message is popped out from outlook causing again numerous "Contacting the server for information ..." messages.
And finally the last, and I guess the easiest way was to block the access to this faulty link. The faulty link was on Internet, and after denying the access to this faulty URL, replying to email messages to this external contact with faulty signature was not a problem anymore.

Outlook does not archive messages based on their received date

A colleague of mine was complaining that his Outlook 2010 (auto)archive option does not work. He showed me that he wanted to archive all emails received before for example 01/11/2011 (dd/mm/yyyy). And, really all those emails that met the criteria, had received date older than 01/11/2011, were still sitting in his mailbox. But, that's the way how outlook works by default :)
Outlook determines how old are the messages by using one of the following, whichever is later:

• Sent date and time
• Received date and time
• Modified date and time

Hmmm, modified date and time ... After adding the modified column on his view, all those messages that had met the criteria by received date, had modified date 04/08/2012 (dd/mm/yyyy), and that's why they were still sitting in mailbox. This kind of Outlook behavior can be changed. There is a registry key (dword) ArchiveIgnoreLastModifiedTime = 1 . This key should be created for:

• Outlook 2010 in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Preferences
• Outlook 2013 in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Outlook\Preferences

Outlook 2010 requires hotfix 2516474, for changing the default archiving behavior.

More about default Outlook archiving behavior and how to change it on following Microsoft KBs: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/295657 and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2553550 .