Ben’s Tech Blog

We recently noticed that there were some blank entries in the GAL, in other words, there was a completely blank line between some objects in the GAL. If I double-clicked on any of these blank entries I’d receive the following message:

The properties dialog box could not be displayed. Internal MAPI error: An unsupported interface was requested of an object property. Contact your administrator.

The blank entries where only included in the ‘online’ GAL, offline address books were not affected, as well as Outlook Web Access and Outlook Mobile Access.

It turned out that someone had modified the security ACL of an OU, and Exhange no longer had access to view these users. The OU contained user objects for users who had left, but they were still mail-enabled, although interestingly enough, hidden from address lists. Once I set the permissions of the OU back to the default (which includes rights for the Exchange Domain Servers and Exchange Enterprise Servers, and rebuilt the domain RUS object the blank entries disappeared.

Despite being an excellent product, Microsoft Exchange has some limitations when it comes to email management for teams. There are several approaches to implementing a team email delivery/management solution with an ‘out of the box’ Exchange deployment but unfortunately each solution has a drawback.

This topic has been on my mind a fair bit recently as we have been setting up team messaging solutions under a new company structure. In the past I’ve implemented custom form solutions to manage team messages so that all of the desired features are incorporated, however custom forms are not used by this company and they don’t wish to use them moving forward. With that in mind, we had to look at the default solutions and compare their behaviors before making recommendations to the various teams.

The following table illustrates the solutions that we offered to each team with the behavior of the replies to messages that are sent to the team. Interestingly enough, accessing a shared mailbox via OWA was often the best solution for customer service teams that wanted to be able to track their sent items.

We had a user contact us yesterday who had deleted a public folder that contained a large number of subfolders and items. This is not usually too much of a drama, we have a 14 day deleted items retention period on our public folder stores, so its usually just a case of adding the DumpsterAlwaysOn key to the registry on the client, browsing to the parent public folder, clicking on Tools, then Recover Deleted Items and selecting the folder to recover. This time however, we received the following message when attempting to recover the folder:

“Outlook was unable to recover some or all of the items in this folder. Make sure you have the required permissions to recover items in this folder, and try again. If the problem persists, contact your administrator.”

Naturally, we checked the permissions; in fact we tried to use the Exchange service account mailbox to recover the folder but received the same error. We also tried temporarily disabling Trend ScanMail (our Exchange level antivirus) in case it was interfering with the recovery process. The folder would actually appear in Outlook temporailly before it produced the error, at which point it would disappear again.

We did a lot of searching around to find a solution; most forums and articles that we came across either suggested to check permissions and disable the antivirus like we had done or use isinteg to repair the database (which I’m not such a fan of). Others suggested that it wasn’t possible to recover the folder at all. After some more searching I came across a tool called MFCMapi.

Once I downloaded MFCMapi, I was able to browse the folders that had been deleted. I tried to recover the folder that the user had deleted, but it produced an error. However, because I was able to browse the sub folders, I attempted to recover one of the them and it was successful. I tried several folders, some were successful and others were not. I figured if we could get some of the contents back it would be better than nothing. It appeared that some of the contents were corrupted, which would explain was why Outlook was unable to recover the folder. Outlook doesn’t provide the option to recover the sub folders, and this is where MFCMapi really helped. I was able to restore the majority of sub folders with 5 or 6 of them not wanting co-operate.

You can download MFCMapi from here.

Once downloaded and extracted, run MFCMapi.exe and close the welcome window. To browse deleted public folders do the following:

1. Click on the Session menu and click on Logon and Display Store tables. You’ll see that it uses Outlook to connect to the stores, select your Outlook profile and click on OK

2. Click on the MDB menu and select Open Public Folder store. Tick the Use Admin Privilegesbox and click on OK.

3. Expand Public Root and IPM_SUBTREE. You’ll then see the public folders that you would normally see under “All Public Folders” in Outlook.

4. Navigate through the public folder tree until you get to the parent folder of the folder that you are trying to restore.

5. Right click on the parent folder and select Open Deleted Sub Folder Table. A new window will open displaying the deleted subfolders. Right click on the folder and select Restore Deleted Folder. A box will open up that allows you to select to also restore the subfolders, tick that option and click on OK. You may receive an error message stating that the folder couldn’t be restored, much like I did.

If you don’t receive the message then the restore was successful and you should see the public folder and items appear in Outlook. If not, don’t panic just yet, you may be able to restore some (hopefully most) of the subfolders. If this is the case, just navigate through the folder structure and attempt to restore each folder. Unfortunately it doesn’t allow you to select multiple folders using CTRL or SHIFT; I spent a fair bit of time restoring each folder one by one.

Considering that I was able to restore most of the folders and items that had been deleted, I was happy with the result, and so was the user. MFCMapi proved to be a very useful tool and I’m sure there will be times when I’ll need to use it again.

I have added a script that I created last week to search for text in Outlook message attachments.

VBScript - Search Outlook Message attachments

Summary: To force Outlook to resolve a name from the Contacts folder instead or the GAL, add ‘(e’ after the name that you want to resolve.

If you’re using Outlook in a corporate environment, you will most likely use two address books: the global address list (GAL) and your Outlook contacts.  The order in which these are searched when performing a ‘Check Names’ is determined by the order specified in your profile.  In Outlook 2003, you can modify the order by opening the address book and clicking on Tools, then Options.  You will be presented with the following dialog box, and can use the arrows to the right of the lower box to change the order of the address books.

In most cases you will specify the GAL as the first entry and your Contacts as the second entry as most users send a greater volume of emails internally than externally.The problem however is that if you want perform a check names for an external recipient and you have a large GAL, chances are the name is going to resolve to one or more names in the GAL and not the recipient in your Contacts folder.  A while back I discovered a little trick to overcome this.  The display name of recipients in your Contacts folder is suffixed with ‘(email)’, so all you need to do to ensure that the name that you enter will resolve against your Contacts folder instead of your GAL is to include ‘(E’ after the name.  For example, if you have a recipient called John Black in the GAL, and a recipient called John White in your contacts folder, typing ‘John (e’ and performing a ‘check names’ will force Outlook to resolve the name to John White from your Contacts folder, because the ‘(e’ doesn’t exist in the display name for John Black in the GAL.

This trick regularly saves me time so I thought I’d share it with you

Setting an alternate reply address is particularly useful if you are using a mail enabled public folder or distribution list for a group of users and would like the replies to messages that they send to go to the group smtp address instead of the sender’s mailbox.

There are a several ways to set the reply address for a new message. The first two methods that I will cover are acheived using a custom form. The other method is to set the address programmatically by using vbscript (or another language).

Custom Form methods:

There are 2 different ways to set the reply address using a custom form; both methods have slightly different results. The first method is to simply populate the ‘from’ field with the address that you’d like replies to be sent to. When using this method, the recipient will clearly see that the message has a different ‘from’ address and, as expected, when they hit reply their mail client will address the message to the ‘from’ address.

The second method is to click on the options button for the new message and enter an address in the “have replies sent to:” field. This method preserves the sender’s name, but sets a different reply address. The recipient will see that the message was sent by the sender, but when they hit reply the mail client will address the message to an alternate address.

With both of these methods you need to compose a new message, set the required options and then publish the item as a custom form. You can then use that custom form when you wish to send a message with the alternate reply address. There is a way that you can programmatically create a new message based a custom form; I promise I’ll post that soon.

Custom forms have their limitations however. For a start, the form needs to be published somewhere first; either in the organisational forms library, personal forms library, or a folder. Forms in the local forms cache are also prone to corruption and custom forms in general can be fiddly. Therefore the custom form method is not my preferred method.

Scripted Method (vbscript)

There are few different ways to make it easy for users to click a button to compose their message with the alternate reply address. You could write some VBA code and assign a toolbar button to it; when the users want to send a message using the alternate reply address they simply click the toolbar button. Another approach is to create an html folder homepage for a folder or public folder. In the html code, you can create a button to run some vbscript code to create the message and set the reply address (see below). The advantage to using a public folder homepage is that you avoid having to copy the VBA code to each workstation and manually creating a toolbar button. You can extend the concept by using the Outlook View Control(OVC) in your HTML homepage so that you have a ‘New Message’ button, and directly below have the contents of the public folder displayed in the OVC. The Outlook View Control is beyond the scope of this entry but because it’s so useful it’s on my list of blog topics!

When I first attempted to set the reply address using vbscript (before I downloaded the object model map!) I was trying to set the reply address using the wrong property. I tried two properties first: the SenderName and SenderEmailAddress properties. When I tried to set these properties with vbscript I would receive an error message stating “property is read-only”. If you refer to the object model you’ll see that these are in fact read-only.

The correct property to assign a reply address is the SentOnBehalfOfName property. I’ll admit that when I first saw this property I didn’t try it straight away as I assumed that it would have been read-only too based on the fact that the name of the property is in past tense (SentOnBehalfOfName). The SentOnBehalfOfName sets the ‘from’ field in the new message, so using this method has the same effect as the first custom form method above.

Here is an example of how create a new outlook mail item with an alternate reply address:

Set OlApp = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
Set NewMessage = olApp.CreateItem(0)
NewMessage.SentOnBehalfOfName = "test@test.com"
NewMessage.Display

if you are scripting or programming with Outlook 2003, I recommend that you download the Outlook 2003 object model map from the microeye website (http://www.microeye.com/resources/code.htm).

I set up a new desktop for myself at work recently with Windows XP and Office 2003. I hadn’t installed SP2 for XP on my previous machine as I hadn’t fully tested it yet in our corporate environment. This time round I decided to bite the bullet and install SP2 as a colleague of mine had installed it on his machine and hadn’t had any problems.

After I had been using my PC for a few weeks I noticed that there was a delay receiving new messages in Outlook. If I opened another message I would quite often receive a few messages at the same time. It would also take up to 60 seconds for messages to be visible in by Outlook inbox if I wasn’t actively using Outlook. I wasn’t using cached mode and was therefore a little baffled as to why there was a delay.

After a bit of searching a came across an explanation. Exchange sends a UDP packet to the Outlook client when a new message is delivered to the mailbox. When the Windows firewall is enabled the UDP packet gets blocked and therefore Outlook has no way of knowing that there is a new message. When this happens Outlook reverts to polling the Exchange server every 60 seconds.

To allow the packets to reach Outlook you can create an exception for outlook.exe in the Windows firewall. Another method is to create an exception for the UDP port. The UDP port that Exchange uses to send the notification is dynamic; it is issued by the Outlook client when outlook opens. There is however a registry key that can be set for Outlook 2003 so that it uses the same port each time.

I read a few articles and discussions about this issue. The following link contains allot of relevant information with links to the Microsoft articles that describe which registry keys to modify to set a static UDP port for the notifications.

http://listserv.vt.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0408&L=techsupport&T=0&F=&S=&P=21999

I’ve been using vbscript to automate tasks and collect data from outlook. Yesterday I was using the restrict method to filter task items in a in a public folder that were created that day so that I could count the items and display it on a web page. I had a bit of trouble at first; I could use a static date value but when I was trying to use a string I was getting an error. I soon realised that I was constructing the code wrong. I thought I’d blog the code that worked as I found it difficult to find any examples online.

I’ve listed 2 examples, the first uses a static date value (note that I’m in Australia so our date settings are dd/mm/yyyy). The second uses a string.

Static value:
Set TodaysTickets = colAssignedItems.Restrict("[CreationTime] > '26/11/2005'")

String Value:
TodaysDate = DateValue(Now())
Set TodaysTickets = colAssignedItems.Restrict("[CreationTime] >'" & TodaysDate & "'")