Outlook 2013 - Public folder cached mode search not working
I am using Outlook 2013 with two Exchange E-Mail accounts of the same Exchange server (one is my own mailbox and the other one is a functional mailbox for a group of users). For some reason I cannot use the second account as an additional mailbox of the first account, but rather I need it to be a second mail account, which is now working smoothly with Outlook 2013. I am using Cached mode and I also choose to Download Public folder favorites.

In Public folders I have chosen some favorites.

Now when I am trying to search in this favorite public folders I do not get a result.

If I disable "Download Public folder favorites" search is working again.

If I remove the functional mailbox and having only one mailbox in my profile the search is working with "Download Public folder favorites" enabled.

If I use two Exchange mail accounts of the same server, I can also see the public folders two times. One time for my own mailbox and one time for the functional mailbox. I suspect that this is causing the trouble.

I tried to have one of the two mailboxes without cached mode. I tried to choose the Public folder favorite on both mailboxes. But all did not help, search is not working.

Search is only working if both mailboxes are without cached mode.

Search is also working in cached mode if I go directly to the public folder and not via the favorite (but this is incovenient since the public folder structure is rather complex).

And more strange, If I add the favorite in each of the mailboxes public folders, the favorite appears twices under "Persons/Contacts" (it is a public folder with contacts). But if I remove the public folder favorite on of the mailboxes public folders, the favorite is removed on both public folder instances.

Does anyone experience the same issue?

Might anyone have a solution to this?

Is it maybe a known bug that might get fixed?

For me it seems that this behaviour can not be intended.

I appreciate any comments on this.

Thanks a lot.

Stefan


March 29th, 2015 8:18am

Hi,

Download users Public Folder Favorites to users' .ost files as part of Cached Exchange Mode synchronizations by choosing the Download Public Folder Favorites option. By default, Public Folder Favorites are not downloaded. Just like with shared folders, downloading Public Folder Favorites increases the size of users' .ost files. Also, synchronizing Public Folder Favorites might cause additional network traffic that could be annoying for users who have slow connections.

This issue could be caused by corrupted .ost file. I suggest to recreate both .ost file to check this issue.

  1. Exit Outlook.
  2. In Control Panel, click or double-click Mail.
  3. In the Mail Setup dialog box, click E-mail Accounts.
  4. Click the Data Files tab, select the Exchange account, and then click Open File Location.
  5. A file explorer window opens to the location of the data file for the Exchange account. The Account Settings and Mail Setup dialog boxes will remain open, behind the file explorer window.
  6. Close the Account Settings and the Mail Setup dialog boxes, then return to the file explorer window.
  7. In the file explorer window, right-click the Exchange data file and then click Delete. The next time you start Outlook, a new .ost file is created for the account.

Best Regards.

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March 30th, 2015 5:08am

Hi,

I have tested this on two different computers with different mail accounts and the behaviour is the same in both situations, so I assume that this is not a problem with a corrupted .ost file. It rather seems to me that this is by design in Microsoft Outlook 2013.

So I am questioning if there is some reason behind this or if it is a bug in Outlook. The latter looks more plausible to me.

March 30th, 2015 1:41pm

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