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Outlook 2003 and Exchange Server 2010 Mailboxes
In this article I would like to tell you about my experiences with Outlook 2003 as the mail client application, connecting to an Exchange 2010 Mailboxserver. While working on a migration project where the company decided to move to Exchange 2010, some issues with Outlook 2003 clients showed up.
The first issue is probably the easiest to solve.
Exchange 2010 requires encrypted connections.
When you run the following Exchange Powershell command:
Get-RpcClientAccess
you will receive the output as displayed below:
Outlook 2003 will not support encryption by default, you can switch that on if you want, but with 100 + mailboxes you will have to change your Group Policies for Outlook clients. If you don’t need Encrypted connections in your Office network you can simply reconfigure the Exchange Server by running the following Powershell command:
Set-RpcClientAccess –server <servername> -EncryptionRequired $false
If you run the Get-RpcClientAccess command again, you will see that encryption is now turned off.
In Outlook 2007 or higher, encryption is turned on by default so this is not an issue in these products.
The second issue caused a lot more problems.
Outlook 2003: E-mail messages take a long time to send and receive when you use an Exchange 2010 mailbox
1. Outgoing e-mail messages stay in the Outbox for an extended period of time (duration lasts up to 1 minute).
2. New e-mail messages do not arrive in the Inbox in a timely manner (delay lasts up to 1 minute).
3. Items that are deleted from folders do not immediately disappear from the folder (delay lasts up to 1 minute).
4. Items that are moved from one folder to another folder do not immediately disappear from the original folder (delay lasts up to 1 minute).
The general symptom that you experience is that folder updates do not occur in a timely manner.
The reason for this is that Outlook 2003, when started up, tries to subscribe to UDP-notifications from an Exchange 2010 Server. If Outlook 2003 doesn’t receive these notifications it will revert back to the polling mechanism, which basically means it will poll the Exchange Server every 60 seconds. The problem is that Exchange 2010 won’t send UDP notifications to Outlook 2003 clients.
This behavior can lead to annoying error messages, for example:
If you delete an e-mail message in your inbox, the message won’t automatically disappear. You probably think that you did something wrong and you try to delete it again. Then you get an unknown error from Outlook 2003 as shown in the picture below:
(sorry, I use the Dutch version of Outlook)
If you switch focus to another mail folder and then go back, the message is gone. This will give your Helpdesk a lot of work!
Microsoft has a KB article on this issue, you can find it at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;2009942&sd=rss&spid=13965
In this article they give you two solutions:
The first one is to install “Update Rollup 1 for Exchange Server 2010”. Look for it at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;976573
After you install the update you have to make some changes in the registry, go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINECurrentControlSetServicesMSExchangeRPCParametersSystem
1. Note Create the ParametersSystem registry subkey if it does not exist.
2. Add the following registry data to the server:
Value type: REG_DWORD
Value name: Maximum Polling Frequency
Value data: any integer between 5000 and 120000
3. Exit the Registry editor
So I changed the Polling Frequency to 10000, which is the lowest value Outlook 2003 will accept. This means that Outlook will now poll the Server every 10 seconds. I restarted the RPC Client Access Service and I restarted Outlook, The delays went down to 10 seconds, but they are still there.
The second solution in the Microsoft article is to switch on Cache Mode in Outlook 2003, that actually works and the problem disappears. Unfortunately this option will create OST-files and in the company I worked for there are dozens of 5GB + mailboxes, so they did not approve the Cached Mode configuration.
End of story, they decided to upgrade to a newer version of Office later this year.
Jos Hollink
Posted in Uncategorized
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