Users Missing from Exchange 2007 GAL
We are having a problem where all mailboxes that have the 'Automatically update email address based on email policy' option disabled do not appear in the address list for Outlook users...though they DO appear in the address list for OWA users. We support users choosing between the SMTP alias being either DomainLogin@company.com or first.last@company.com. When setting up a user with the latter naming convention, we have to disable the option to allow us to set the alternate SMTP address as the reply address. Doing this works fine for the user in that they now had the proper address on their replies, but when we do this the address disappears from the GAL for Outlook users. I've tried forcing a GAL update on the server, but the addresses still do not appear... Anyone have an idea what would cause this? We are running Exchange Server 2007 with the latest updates and the clients are all running Outlook 2007. jon
September 10th, 2007 4:05pm

Hi, I've faced this problem before, and i noticed that, the problem is from Offline Address Book , not GAL since you can see all your users from OWA GAL. and even you can view all users GAL from outlook 2007 and 2003 even, when you disable the Exchange Cache Mode in the user's outlook profile. what i did , i tried to rebuild the OAB again, but still the problem wasn't resolved till i deleted the OAB and recreated it again, then it worked. please try it and let me know if this solved your problem or not. Regards Alaa
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September 10th, 2007 5:00pm

Deleting and recreating the Offline Address List did not correct the problem for me. In looking at the event log, I now see errors like this for all users that are configured to use the First.Last naming convention: OALGen will skip user entry 'User's Name' in address list '\Global Address List' because the SMTP address '' is invalid. - Default Offline Address List
September 10th, 2007 10:42pm

Ok, check this link, it talks about your problem, and the solution for it. How to use OABInteg's oabfldcheck and proxytest to troubleshoot OAB Generation issues and Missing objects after an OAB downloads http://blogs.msdn.com/dgoldman/archive/2007/03/08/how-to-use-oabinteg-s-oabfldcheck-and-proxytest-to-find-oab-issues.aspx please let me know if the above article did solve your problem. Regards Alaa
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September 11th, 2007 6:22am

Have seen issiues with OAB when the windows mail attribute is differnet from Exchange attribute proxyaddresses. Check in ADUC on the general tab and the email address attribute, compare it to what EMC says on the email addresses tab, they should be the same, but sometimes they are not and it causes OAB generation not to include that recipient
September 11th, 2007 5:30pm

It looks like this was the cause of the problem for me. I had to update the User object in AD to have the same Email address as the Reply To address on their Exchange mailbox. After doing that, the users are now included in the OAB. This seems like a bug to me. The IDs showed up fine in OWA, but not in Outlook...doesn't seem like that should be possible. Thanks, jon
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September 14th, 2007 2:53pm

Just incase others have issues finding the KB as I did:http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936197Mike Crowley: MCT, MCSE, MCTS, MCITP: Enterprise Administrator / Messaging Administrator
February 19th, 2009 4:30pm

"I had to update the User object in AD to have the same Email address as the Reply To address on their Exchange mailbox. After doing that, the users are now included in the OAB." THANK YOU! We were pulling our hair out until we tried this. I agree, it sounds like a bug. As a "feature" it makes no sense whatsoever.
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July 31st, 2012 4:58pm

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