Troubleshooting

Following are some good resources on universal troubleshooting:

The Universal Troubleshooting Process (UTP)
http://www.troubleshooters.com/tuni.htm

Exchange: Outlook and OWA attachment issues

Outlook client does not display attachments

There are a number of reasons why this might be the case.

• See http://knicksmith.blogspot.com/2007/03/exchange-2007-and-outlook-2003-where.html. An issue was resolved by Microsoft in Exchange 2003 Service Pack 1 where Exchange 2007 was incorrectly causing Outlook 2003 to hide inline attachments. Even though you could not see the attachment, if you flagged the email, or clicked forward on the email, the attachment would appear correctly. Also if you selected Save attachments from the file menu, it would still save the attachments. OWA is not affected by this.
• See http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchangesvrclients/thread/478c326b-486b-461c-9141-dd544b245c75. Symptoms: You can see the attachment in OWA but not in any of the current versions of Outlook. Outlook blocks the attachment completely and there is no way to retrieve it through this interface. This is also more likely to happen when an inhouse application has been programmed to send email with attachments. if the MIME is formatted incorrectly then Outlook will not display it. RFC 2387 describes the intended use of multipart/related:
  http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2387.txt:
  "The Multipart/Related media type is intended for compound objects consisting of several inter-related body parts. For a Multipart/Related object, proper display cannot be achieved by individually displaying the constituent body parts."
  Steps to resolve this issue involve changing the MIME header to Multipart/Mixed instead of Multipart/Related. Multipart/Related will cause the attachment to be considered inline by Outlook. As there is no reference to the attachment in the body, it will then effectively be ignored. OWA has more smarts and is able to determine if an attachment is really inline or not. If it finds no reference to the attachment in the body of the email then it displays the attachment as a separate entity.

Outlook: Offline Folder (OST) issues

This article lists many of the ways in which you can troubleshoot an issue with the Outlook offline mail file. This file is often refered to as an OST.

Determine more about the issue:

• Record the error messages that are appearing.
• An error at the beginning that asks if you would like to start in online or offline mode indicates that Outlook believes there is a discrepancy between the information in the OST and the mailbox.
• Record the steps taken in order to receive the error condition. In some cases, the computer has to be shutdown, disconnected from the network and restarted before the OST issue will reveal itself.
• Have the user log onto another computer and perform the tests using the same version of Windows and Office if possible.
• Create a new test user with mailbox on the computer where the fault occurs, and see if the same issues occur.

Try the following steps to resolve an OST issue:

• Ensure the user has read/write access to the OST file location.
• Create a new profile and at the same time, change the location of the OST. If there is autoconfiguration involved, there may be a %username% in the location. Remove this and replace with a real path instead, as well as setting a name for the OST that does not already exist in that location. When it asks to create a new OST, click Yes. Finish the profile creation and set it to open when Outlook is next opened. The error message should generally be resolved by this step.
• Shutdown Outlook and rename the OST file. Restart Outlook and check if the issue reoccurs. Note: If the user has been writing to their OST and it has not been synchronised to the server, you will lose this information. Try to determine first if this is the case.
• Create a new Outlook profile.
• If the user is running Outlook 2003, you may try upgrading to Office 2007. This has been proven to resolve some OST issues (where the OST itself does not appear to be at fault).
• Try performing an uninstall and reinstall of Office. This has been proven to not resolve some OST issues.
• Empty out the deleted items folder. Deleted items may have become corrupted or too large.
• Remove any delegates on the mailbox. Delegates may have become corrupted and/or orphaned.
• Export any inbox rules and then delete what is there. Rules can become corrupted. These can be re-imported when testing is complete.
• Right click on a folder in Outlook and select properties. Select the synchronisation tab and check if the folder has synchronised successfully. If the synchronisation tab is not available then you may not be in cached mode. See KB842284. To synchronise all folders, press Send/Receive All. To synchronise just a single folder, select the folder and select Send/Receive this folder only.
• Replace the Exchange server service support files for Outlook. In Office 2007, rename the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\emsmdb32.dll. Go to Add/Remove Programs, select Reinstall or repair, then Reinstall. In Offce 2003 you should rename emsabp32.dll, emsmdb32.dll, emsui32.dll, then reinstall Office. See KB842284.
• Try running the OSTScan tool to check for corruption. Run without the automatic repair first. It will create a report in the deleted items folder. Check the report for issues. Rerun the tool in repair mode if required. See http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/scan-and-repair-corrupted-outlook-data-files-HA010075831.aspx?pid=CH100788841033#BM2
• Try moving the mailbox to a new Exchange server if this is an option.

SMTP and Internet mail toubleshooting

Issues with Internet mail delivery

If your mail is getting rejected:

• Check your mail domain is configured correctly in external DNS at http://www.intodns.com/
• Check that your mail domain has not been blacklisted at http://www.mxtoolbox.com/
• Check that your domain has a PTR record in public DNS
• Check that your domain has an SPF record. Absense of this record will make other mail systems more likely to reject mail or classify it as spam. See http://www.openspf.org/Why for more information or to test SPF.

If mail is getting rejected by hotmail, check http://postmaster.live.com/.

Issues with scanning to email

If you are scanning mail to your inbox but it is not arriving, or other email is not arriving consistently:

• Check if other people are able to receive mail from the scanner
• Find the IP address and name of the scanner, and try to manage it remotely through HTTP or HTTPS
• Check junk email folder. If they are going into junk email, add the scanner "from" address to the safe senders list on the Outlook client.

Issue sending to Exchange 2007 distribution lists from external

If you are sending to a distribution list that is hosted in Exchange and you sending from external, you may receive the following very helpful error messages: -

• Your message wasn't delivered because of security policies. Microsoft Exchange will not try to redeliver this message for you. Please provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator.
• #550 5.7.1 RESOLVER.RST.AuthRequired; authentication required ##rfc822;travnatad@smtpex.toll.com.au

The answer is generally quite simple. An Exchange 2007 distribution list requires senders to be authenticated by default. To disable this, go into the distribution list properties and on the Mail Flow tab, select Message Delivery Restrictions. Uncheck the box that says "Require that all senders are authenticated". Then mail will start to flow.