Here is the story, I have a colleague, let's call her Anna. Anna's account is disabled by mistake once a time, after being recoverd by someone, might be ad admin, I find the inbox rule is not working for her account.

I have an inbox rule which will route all message from her account such as anna@abc.com to a folder named Anna. Now her account is still anna@abc.com, while the messages from her never go to the right folder.

I wonder why...

Hi ,

First of all , please check the still the mailboxes is having that rules or not.Because anna's account was been disabled before and it was enabled again by an admin.

Run the below mentioned command in the exchange management shell to check .

get-InboxRule -Mailbox "anna's" | ft -au

Please reply me if anything is unclear.

Hi,

If we disable a mailbox, the inbox rule will be deleted as well. After we enable this mailbox, we need to recreate this inbox rule. Besides when we create, modify, remove, enable, or disable an Inbox rule on Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, any client-side rules created by Microsoft Outlook are removed. We also need to recreate these client-side rules on outlook.

Best Regards.

Hi Nithyanandham& Lynn,

Thanks for the response.

I'm not administrator so I cannot use power shell to see if inbox is still existing. From my side, I can only see the rule is still there from my outlook.

Could you test if you disable an account in AD, the inbox rule will disappear from server side and outlook client app?

Hi,

I have tested it in my lab. After I disable an account and enable this account later, the inbox rule will disappear from server side and OWA.

Exchange side:

OWA:

Before I disable this account, I create a inbox rule Named Sent to 'Test User1'. Then I disable and enable this account, this inbox rule disappearred.

Best Regards.

Hi ,

I agree with Lynn-Li

Thanks for the test...

It proves the inbox rule will disappear from server, however, it doesn't disappear from outlook.

So how can sync inbox rule so that it can be removed automatically when it is removed from server?

Please check these rules via OWA. If these are no rules in OWA, then these rules saved on outlook client will not work and we need to recreate these rule.

We should understanding the Inbox Rules from Server-side and client-side first.

An Inbox Rule can be a client-side or a server-side rule. A server-side rule can be performed without any requirement from the local machine, for example: change the importance of a message; move the incoming message to a specific folder on the User Mailbox; delete a message and so on. The general rule is that all the components must be on the server side.

A client-side rule requires processing from the Outlook client, an example of a client-side rule is move specific messages identified by the rule to a PST folder. This rule cannot be processed at the server-level because the server is not able to work with a PST file on that context.

When we create, modify, remove, enable, or disable an Inbox rule on server-side, any client-side rules created by outlook will be removed, that doesn't mean it has been deleted from outlook side.

If there are anything unclear, please let me know.