I was running Outlook 2013 with exchange 2010. On upgrade to 2016, it no longer works. There's no area to specify proxy and so far I haven't had any luck getting it to work.
The user finger tapped (Wait a moment – He is not gonna agree “just like that” so keep reading till the end) Now the alarm goes off only post “An important meeting vanished” and the problem starts here. So we call it “INTERMITTENT”. Maybe you are looking at this article after this happened, if yes let me tell you my friend this is not an article to find out the root cause or troubleshoot the issue “ after it happened“, but to explain how to align your existing setup with all best practices and find out what/who did it if it happened again. Before looking at troubleshooting this issue, you need to read and implement these best practices or we will be “Going in Circles”. Microsoft Outlook is undeniably the best feature rich application blending your online and offline transitions perfectly with its proficient capabilities on all your emails, contacts, calendar and meetings. Best practices on how to manage delegate access in Outlook To begin with, Microsoft Outlook gives you incredible capabilities, and one of these is your delegate access.
A little confusing right, delegate and all, huh? To make it easy, it’s like having someone to create and manage your meetings, on your behalf. This person, who does it, is called as a delegate, meaning, you are delegating your tasks.
Now when you have someone, to do that, you got to set the level of privileges as well for it, which you accomplish by the below levels. Now when you assign some delegate as an Editor, you are giving him/her, the privileges of creating meeting requests, sending meeting requests, editing and deleting meeting requests as well. In addition, he/she can also be given access to receive mails pertaining the meetings, PRIVATE ITEMS and also accept and reject meetings on your behalf. You could also assign a delegate as an Author, giving him/her the privileges of creating meeting requests and reading through your Calendar, PRIVATE ITEMS but he/she cannot modify or delete meeting requests. They can be given access to receive mails pertaining the meetings however.
You could also assign a delegate as a Reviewer who can view your calendar and PRIVATE ITEMS but cannot do any edits on it. You can add your delegate by going to the Calendar pane, then going to File and under Account settings, select Delegate Access. You get something as below and herein, you add your delegate. You are all set with adding a delegate but now how do you give them the priviliges? Now once you add a delegate, you would immediately be asked as to which kind of a delegate is he/she as shown below. This is all the necessary basics that you should know to understand delegate functionality. The following are the best practices that you can use for managing delegate access in Outlook.
Make sure your CAS Servers, mailbox servers and Blackberry servers has the latest updated patches/Roll ups from Microsoft No go??? Enable tracing and Escalate. NOTE: I would personally recommend you have a Microsoft support engineer on call before proceeding because these steps since enabling tracing and could cause issues if you don’t enable it properly. The location specified for the trace target might get filled up pretty easily, so have a plan with your backup team to have it backed up or so.
Exchange 2007 comes in built with ExTRA which helps you trace activities that occur in the store or database. Open cmd prompt as admin and type ExTra to open it “or”. Start – Run – ExTra.
This will open the Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant. Now Select a new task and click next and select “Trace control”. This will throw an error “This server does not have the module needed for interpreting traces.
As a best practice, have the user reset his device to factory settings and re-configure the email App. If its an Outlook profile which did it, depending upon which profile have the user delete the OST file How to prove “It’s not Exchange’s fault” Exchange 2010 has which could overcome issues caused by system, but what if the user/delegate deleted it? Well, we can’t just wait for the alarm to go off and then think of implementing these changes.
So, have a meeting with your management and have this practice in place already:. Collate all top executive’s mailbox on these 3 databases and permanently enable tracing for them By implementing this, we already have the logs ready for Microsoft to analyze the next time your CEO shouts, ” Where the heck did my meeting vanish”? Ratish Nair MVP Exchange Team @MSExchangeGuru Keywords: Missing calendar appointments, Exchange server calendar vanishing, Exchange 2007 calendar issues, exchange server calendar deleted, appointments got deleted, delegate issues with outlook, calendar issues with Exchange, how to troubleshoot missing calendar appointments.
44 Responses to “Mystery of vanishing outlook meeting requests – SOLVED!!!”. Swaminathan Says: Nice one!!even i have came across this issue and determind that iphone was causing the issue, but i didnt took a trace. You mean enabling the EXTRA on a mailbox server? Or its a different one?.
Swaminathan Says: To over come this situation you can enable CRA if you are using Exchange 2010. Ratish Sekhar Says: Well you need to contact Microsoft PSS and get the trace file because the trace file changes with different versions of STORE.EXE So every Service pack upgrade or Rollup upgrade might require a new trace file. Amanda Says: Awesome post Sai. I was looking for something similar. Glad I subscribed. Amanda L Global IT Manager. John Mayor Says: Gorgeous post.
Indeed the best out there on the subject. Meetings vanishing is the biggest pain with any version of Exchange. Could you also let me know if it is advisable to have tracing enabled for stores and how much space it may consume? John M. Ratish Sekhar Says: @John – it depends on transactions on the store, number of users etc. I should have said that in the article – You need to closely watch and ensure the drive which has tracing enabled doesn’t get filled up.
Geni Says: Wow. Thank you a lot. Can u tell us how to read the trace? Geni. Mohammed Imthyas Says: Yep this is a good one. Many managers use the Phone Devices and complain that meetins have vanished, I have seen this many times in my Org. They are not ready to buy in if we tell them to check the Outlook Do’s and Dont’s for Calendar.
We have wait for the issue to reoccur after we enable logging for the mailbox and one problem with it is that the user feels that mailbox is slow and again they start complaining. So without enabling logging on users mailbox and on Server, we cant give Microsoft the required info. Only if the user is helpful it is possible.And that too if you have a cluster, you need to make sure that if you fail over, you need to do the same on the present active node.
Paul Says: I actually came across a similar issue where accepted invitation were send to another user instead of the calendar owner and our used the Microsoft Exchange Server Information Store Viewer utility, the MDBView utility, to identify the delegate rules and remove them. The Outlook delegate rules are stored in the Inbox folder.The delegate rule is an item in the Associated Messages in FLD window, in the CB entry, and has a description of “Schedule + EMS Interface. Why did the do that. Apparently we were using Outlook 2011 for mac and removing delegates would not help. I would very interested and very grateful to anyone in here talking about an easier solution to this. SA Says: Ratish, I believe ETL tracking is used for diagnostics purposes only!
And not be used as a proactive measure. By permantently enabling tracing, wont the server performance be impacted? Also, wouldnt it create a gazillion gb of.etl logs?
SA. Ratish Sekhar Says: Yes Sir youre right ETL files are only for troubleshooting purposes I have databases dedicated for “Top guys” on a server with a lotta breathing space so I can enable this tracing. The only reason being these big guys don’t like me saying “We will wait for it to happen again” I’m left with no option If you want to enable tracing, dont enable it for all users as the server will have performance issues. SA Says: Ratish, How do you manage to setup trace for multiple users or setup trace for a specific database. Cant find the option to setup ‘Store’ tags based on database.
The option for database level trace applicable to MailSubmission and InforWorker. I reckon. An suggestions. SA. Ratish Sekhar Says: For setting up trace per database, you gotta contact PSS and they will give you a “Store.ttd” file so that you can start the trace. The output for this specific trace is going to be hugeee. SA Says: One more question.
I’m familiar with store.ttd traces. We have had PSS enable traces using store.ttd on Exhange 2003 servers. Is it still valid for Exchange 2010. SA. Says: Mystery of vanishing outlook meeting requests – SOLVED!!! תגים:Exchange 2010, ITPRO, Outlook. zulma27 Says: Thanks this is very helpful.
I can’t find a resolution for the follwing. Exchange 2007 SP1 and Exchange 2010 SP1 with outlook 2010 clients. Users with iphones 4s devices and reoccuring meetings will just completely dissapear after, the delegate, assistant, will make a change to it. Tomorrow i will look at how the delegate permission are set on their client machines. ashish lakkundi Says: awesome. Thanks.
Gladis Says: This is awesome, thanks for helping. Says: The fact that you even high to write a post like this shows how flawed of a product Exchange is. AC Says: Hi, IN our case the Calender and contacts were not Syncing with Exchange 2003 with SP2.
It was doing for some and not for other. For few user we even tried doing on different Phones e.g. Android based or Windows Mobile phone, iPad etc but nothing seems to work. Same issue of some entries randomly appearing and not appearing. Did user Mailbox shifting to different store – did not help. Last option – someone suggested to export all entries, mails, drop mailbox and recreate and import back enteries.
But before that someone found the Exchange front End having some memory issue ( fragmented memory space) and require a Re-Boot. Post reboot thing seems to work normally for the users with whom we had Calender Not syncing or Contact not getting fully updated on iPhone as reflected in outlook. Ana Says: I am a calendar delegate with full privileges and have on two occasions experienced an issue where single instances of two meetings that I moved to different dates/times somehow mysteriously reverted back to their original date/time. The first instance, we didn’t realize it until the date of the rescheduled meeting when the other person showed up at the office and we did not see the meeting on the calendar. When I checked, I found that the appointment was appearing on its original time (a past date).
On this first occasion, I assumed this was my error, but when it happened again, I began to suspect that the problem resides elsewhere, i.e., on the server or with calendar syncing between Outlook 2010 on my PC, Outlook for Mac on his machine, and his iPhone calendar. Have you run into this before, and is this type of problem related to what you describe above where appointments vanish?. Ratish Sekhar Says: Hi Ana, You will need to have your admin look at this article and troubleshoot accordingly.
Scenarios like what you mentioned would happen mostly with corrupt OST files on your client computer. Also have your admin move your mailbox to a new database Ratish Nair.
Says: Mystery of vanishing outlook meeting requests – SOLVED Jul 14, 2011 Run Outlook reset switches. Oulook /Cleanfreebusy.
Oulook /Cleanreminders. Oulook /Cleanviews. Oulook /Cleanprofile. Delete the OST file.
Kevin Says: Hi Ratish, Thanks for posting this information. Can you tell me please how I can open and read the etl files?
Thank you, Kevin. Dominik Says: As Swaminathan already mentioned it, the CRA feature of Exchange 2010 really saves you a lot of trouble. It will automatically restore vanished appointments and fixes the response state if you are the organizer of a meeting. We had also a lot of trouble because of this and a lot of mobile devices of all kind and many delegated users.
But I still have an unsatisfied feeling about this, because this is only a smooth workaround and does not go to the roots of the problems. Terri Says: Outlook 2007/2010 setup rule to forward private calendar invites to a delegate that has permissions to view private meetings. The rule does not work in either versions of Outlook. I can’t find any articles on it.
I’ve followed all the steps listed above, and no luck. Is this a known issue? Any thoughts to resolving this would be appreciated. Says: Hi Ratish, Awesome post indeed. Thanks a lot. ? Thanks Mahfuz. erich Says: Is there any distinction in this “problem” between the invitee(s) and the inviter?
For example, user error can easily be the cause of an invitee losing a meeting. Meetings can be deleted without notifying anyone else. On the other hand, I can’t find any means of removing a meeting from the inviter’s calendar without sending out cancellation notices. Also, for an inviter, there is no accept/reject option, no auto-accept, and no receiving emails. Thus, what could cause untouched meetings for the inviter (recently created by a delegate) to disappear while it remains for the invitees? Everyone is using the same Outlook 2010 with accounts on Live@edu (outlook.com) and the account owner (“manager” in this article) uses the latest iOS for referencing/reminders only.
Ratish Sekhar Says: If its something you can repro, then follow the final steps and enable a store tracing for the user account and then involve Microsoft PSS to analyze the trace. erich Says: Thanks for the reply. It’s not predictably reproducible.
We’ve had a few very noticeable ones in the last week or so, but those were only noticed because the appointment times were very close to the time of scheduling. No others have been noticed for a few months, but it is very possible that some missing appointments are never noticed because they are set weeks or months ahead of time. Short of the user/delegate documenting everything on paper and cross-checking (which defeats the purpose of a shared, electronic calendar), how could a very busy/scheduled user/delegate know? We will try your recommendation, but where in the “final steps” should we start? Can that be done using Outlook.com accounts? The user feels (and I have to agree) that this is a very serious problem.
If we can’t trust what is on the calendar, then what is the use of it? Any busy/upper administrator/executive is going to have a delegate and, in this day and age, some kind of portable calendar device (How else would they know of schedule changes when they are away from their office?). While I can appreciate that keeping synchronized calendars is challenging, it is also absolutely essential to a successful product for it to work without these kinds of errors. User error is one thing. Technical errors (regardless of the source) that cause the calendar to be untrustworthy are simply unacceptable.
If file synching had these kinds of reliability problems, nobody would use it. erich Says: An update: The Microsoft support engineer states: “Please note ExTRA trace could not be executed in Live@edu environment as it requires on premise exchange server.” I guess that is a downside of cloud services; You can’t do your own troubleshooting. DK Says: Nice document and Well said the end users mistake become issue and its called “INTERMITTENT” issue.
LOL. Shahar Says: How do you troubleshoot this on Office 365?. Peter Says: Wow, Ratish. Definitely the best thing we’ve seen on the topic too. We’ve had this problem for 10 years running now.
Before Office 365, after Office365,still same issue. We’ve worked with Microsoft on it in the past. We’ve pretty much eliminated all but a few delegates from our company– and those who still have delegation still have the issue.
But this is the best, most cohesive doc I’ve seen. I’m grateful to you for all your coll-headed work here.
Ratish Nair Says: ?. CH Says: Good article. Has anyone experienced issues where some calendar updates are intermittently not being recieved on the apple devices? Adding notes to the meeting/appointment?. DRC Says: Agreed.
Great Article. I can even show it to normal users and they should understand without being IT savvy.
ahwc Says: anyone know roughly how much disk space is required to trace one active user? Thanks.
Suresh Sistla Says: Thanks for the post and the comments. I am seeing this problem with one of out clients. Actually going through the comments section too helped me understand the problem better. ?. Cindy Says: One other “exceedingly painful” issue that is possible – a CFO/Sr Veep had been missing meetings since they were not getting updated properly.
Various issues – meetings missing outright, others missing the additional attendees – and no pattern to it. Microsoft engineer was engaged, and after four months the issue was still occurring, but could not identify nor correct the issue. In the interim, the customer was having his admin resort to daily calls to other admins to confirm changes to his schedule. This went on for nearly a year.
Customer bought a new smartphone, and needed software installed and get it setup for him. During the install, the customer asked if he could still “sync at home”. “HOW are you syncing at home????” “I export my calendar to a thumb drive, import at the home computer and hook my phone up to it.” “If you do that again, I’m giving your admin a 1-iron, and she can beat you with it” Import the exported office calendar to home computer, sync; no connection to Exchange server there, so what did Outlook do? Created a duplicate appointment with only him as an attendee.
What did he do when he looked at the two appointments on the phone? Deleted one of them.
Checked Outlook Out of Office Settings – None. Checked Outlook Rules – None. (other than default) Verified Rules with Get-InboxRules in Powershell – None. Fired up MFCMAPI on user’s mailbox to view Inbox Rule – DING! – There were 2 Rules appearing in MFCMAPI. One clearly the default rule, and the other OOF. – Deleted OOF believing this to be a corrupted Out of Office Message.
10) Leaving ExTra ETL capture to run through the weekend for validation on Monday. Davor Says: Nice fix, I would never think of that.
Phunktional Johnkey Says: Thanks man! It’s 2015 and your post is still leading people in the right direction. Leave a Reply Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website.
. Select Tools Out of Office from the menu in Outlook for Mac. Make sure Send Out Of Office messages is selected. Enter the desired message under Reply to messages with:. Include when — or if — people mailing you in your absence can expect a personal answer.
This might be some time after you will have returned. Make sure More options are visible. If you know when you will be unavailable:. Make sure I am out of the office between. Enter the date and time you'll leave behind email under Start date.
Enter the date and time you'll be back under End date. To have Exchange send messages not only to people in your organization:. Make sure Send replies outside my company to: is checked. Select Address Book contacts only or Anyone outside my company.
Enter the desired message for the out-of-office reply for senders outside your organization under Reply once to each sender outside my company with. You can leave out contact details in this message for the world, for example. Select Tools Rules from the menu in Outlook for Mac. Go to the IMAP or POP category depending on the account for which you are setting up the out-of-office auto-reply. Enter 'Out of Office Auto-Reply' under Rule name. Make sure if all criteria are met is selected under If.
Select All messages as the only criterion. To send auto-replies only to people in your address book, make the criterion read From Is a contact. Under Then, select Reply as the first action. Click Reply Text. Type the desired reply for your out-of-office auto-responder. Optionally, highlight the second action in the list ( Set category None) and click Remove Action.
Make sure Do not apply other rules to messages that meet these criteria is not checked. Do make sure Enabled is checked. If you have other rules, use the blue up arrow button to make sure the new 'Out of Office Auto-Reply' rule comes early enough to be applied to all desired messages. (You can file or delete certain messages before, for example, but have the auto-responder come before rules categorize mail and would stop further processing of these messages.).