THE MYSTERIOUS OUTLOOK OUTBOX

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1 THE MYSTERIOUS OUTLOOK OUTBOX Understand why messages get stuck in the Outbox folder in an Exchange environment. (Today's post is courtesy of Scott Bradley, Principal Escalation Engineer, Office Technical Support.) A TRIP BACK IN TIME THE EVOLUTION OF OUTLOOK A thorough understanding of mail submission/delivery starts with a trip back in time. Years ago, before Outlook was born, Microsoft defined some standards for messaging applications. These standards are commonly referred to as MAPI (Messaging Application Programming Interface), and detailed documentation can still be found on MSDN. At the root of the MAPI world is this idea of three main messaging components: 1. A place to actually STORE the messages the MAPI MESSAGE STORE 2. A method to SEND the messages the MAPI TRANSPORT 3. A place to store and look up ADDRESSES the MAPI ADDRESS BOOK Most people are familiar with the common stores and address books in the Exchange/Outlook world. We have the mailbox and Global Address List (GAL) from Exchange, and things like the PST/OST file and Offline Address Book or Contacts Folder (which is abstracted into an address book by the Outlook Address Book service) from the Outlook side. But this middle part of MAPI, the transport layer, is less understood. In non-exchange scenarios, the transports are much easier to understand. Consider the POP/SMTP setup. You use the POP protocol to receive mail, and SMTP to send mail. The protocols are easy to read and understand. You can look at a network trace and see the commands and the mail going over the wire, etc. In the Exchange scenario, things are more complicated. Along with this notion of the MAPI TRANSPORT being responsible for actually sending mail, MAPI includes the idea of a spooler which is something that manages the transports. It loads them up, checks for mail that needs to be sent and actually calls into the transport s code to send the mail. You can think of it as the driver of mail delivery. Until Outlook 2002, the spooler was implemented in a completely separate executable. So when you ran Outlook (or any other MAPI application), you would also see a process named MAPISP32.EXE in your task list. The spooler ran independently of Outlook. When it came time to send mail, MAPISP32.EXE woke up and did the work of driving the mail. In Outlook 2002 the design changed, and the spooler code was moved into the Outlook executable itself. This design still exists today and has some interesting implications. Understanding these implications means you really have to embrace the fact that Outlook IS the spooler. Anything that you expected to happen with the spooler, now only happens when Outlook is running.

2 It s easy to see the result of this design when you send mail from another application when Outlook is not running. Consider this scenario: 1. Outlook is installed but not running on your computer. 2. On the desktop, you right-click a file and choose Send to Mail Recipient. 3. Outlook comes to life and gives you a message to work on. 4. You type a recipient name and a message, and hit Send. 5. Later you shut down your computer and go home. 6. The next morning, the recipient is mad because they never got the mail. What happens in this case is that immediately AFTER you hit send in step 4, Outlook is done, so it closes. Now Outlook is not running, and therefore no spooler is running, and so nothing is going to send your mail. The next time you launch Outlook, you will see the mail in the Outbox. Assuming Outlook stays open long enough for a spooling cycle to happen (default is 15 minutes), the mail will be sent successfully. One easy way to conceptualize the spooler in Outlook is to think of it as everything in the Send Receive Groups dialog. This dialog roughly maps to the things the Spooler code does and how Outlook manages all the options. As an aside, look closely at the screenshot on the right. This is from a standard cached mode configuration of Outlook. You will notice that almost all the options are gray and unavailable. This is because the Exchange account is NOT included in this group in a standard cached mode configuration. Note the red X over the account on the left, and the empty checkbox at the top. In cached mode, you do NOT typically want the send/receive group settings to apply. Cached mode has its own logic for synchronizing and sending mail, and it is notification based, not scheduled like the send/receive groups. Finally, consider the impact of the cached mode feature that came along for Outlook Cached mode is many things, but one specific part of the cached mode design is that mail delivery uses this spooler process in

3 a more intricate way, and uses it for ALL cached mode sends. Again, it works independent of the settings in the Send/Receive Groups, and it has switches and configuration choices that add complexity. So there are four key takeaways to start our understanding of Outbox problems: 1. MAPI Transports are the way that Outlook sends mail 2. There is this notion of a spooler that is the key to managing and driving the sending mail cycle 3. Outlook.EXE *IS* the spooler ever since Outlook The cache mode feature drastically changed the importance of the spooler MAIL DELIVERY IN EXCHANGE Up until now, I have described the general MAPI ideas around mail delivery and how Outlook implements these options. Now we need to understand some specifics in the Exchange Server configurations. Again, some history is needed to help understand how we got to where we are now. In early versions of Outlook/Exchange, users almost always used Outlook in the online mode of operation. You interacted with Mail and Addresses directly from the Exchange Mailbox. This is in contrast to today s world where most people use cached mode. In cached mode, you work with data and addresses from a LOCAL data store (your OST file), and then synchronize your data to the mailbox. Note that SENDING mail is not the same as synchronizing. The Outbox folder is never part of synchronization. Mail submission and delivery is different from synchronizing. There is a fundamental difference in mail submission/delivery between online and cached mode. Understanding this difference is one big key in your ability to grasp the entire Outbox story. For this blog entry, I am going to define two different methods to deliver mail: 1. Transport Send (this is the spooler method that I described in detail above) 2. Store Send (this is the second method that ONLY is used in the Exchange Online scenario) Since we know that in cached mode you work from your OST and not online, you can see that all cached mode mail delivery must happen using the Transport Send method. If you are running in the old online profile (which is common even today on terminal server configurations), then mail delivery is typically done using the Store Send method. So why do we care which method is used? Mainly because a Store Send does NOT require any of the spooler process to happen. When the Store Send method is used, the message is delivered by the server with no further client interaction. In the send to mail recipient scenario that I described in the previous section, if the Outlook profile is configured for online mode, that mail *IS* sent successfully. Since no spooler is needed to deliver the mail, it is delivered immediately by Exchange, whether Outlook is running or not. There are other differences under the hood for each method. Appendix C has a table that summarizes the differences.

4 HOW OUTLOOK CHOOSES WHICH DELIVERY METHOD TO USE A good way to conceptually think about the Outlook decision process is to think in terms of the Outbox folder itself. When a message is created in the Outbox folder of the OST/PST, Outlook and MAPI hook up all the plumbing so that mail submission happens through the Transport Send method. When a message is created in the Outbox folder of the online mailbox, Outlook and MAPI hook up the plumbing so that mail submission happens through the Store Send method. So using this concept, if you are in cached mode you should expect a Transport Send, and if you are in online mode, you should expect a Store Send. Additionally, even if you are in ONLINE mode and would typically be using the Store Send method, there are options and configurations that will prevent the use of the Store Send. The most common example is the presence of an additional transport. So for example, if you have an online configuration and you ADD an SMTP/POP account, you are no longer eligible for delivery via the Store Send method. Likewise if you add a meeting service transport like the LiveMeeting service, you must now send mail using the Transport Send method. Any additional transport will turn off the ability to do Store Send with Exchange. Finally there are a couple of Outlook configuration options that will turn off the Store Send in online mode. The primary one is the option to save replies with their original mail. So to summarize, you can only take advantage of the Store Send method if: 1. You have Exchange Server. 2. You are configured for online mode and not cached mode. 3. You have no other transports in the profile. 4. You are not using the save replies with original option. The formal term for the save replies with original is this setting in the options dialog:

5 THE NEEDS_SPOOLER FLAG This option gives a good example of an important extra trigger in the mail delivery process. Even if you are using the Store Send method, where the spooler (Outlook) is not required, there are scenarios where the mail will require the spooler. The save replies with original feature requires some processing by the spooler. So even in a Store Send scenario (online mode, no extra transports, etc.), Outlook will add a special flag to the message during submission that tells Exchange not to deliver it immediately. This flag is called the NEEDS_SPOOLER flag. The process looks like this from a non-technical point of view: 1. Outlook s logic runs through some tests and determines that this message will need the spooler for some reason. 2. When Exchange accepts the message for submission, it looks for the this message NEEDS the spooler trigger. 3. If there is no trigger, then Exchange sends the mail itself and you have a Store Send. 4. If the trigger is there that says this message NEEDS the spooler, then Exchange does NOT deliver the message and waits on another command from the spooler before sending. 5. When the spooler cycle happens, it sends the message up to Exchange to Send the message and you have a Transport Send. So all the criteria are tested for each method and in the end, each message either gets the trigger for needs the spooler added or not. Notice that if Outlook calculates that a Transport Send is needed, there is some amount of time between message submission and message delivery. In a Store Send, there is only the one submission, but in the Transport Send, you have the message submission, and then at some later time, the command to do the Transport Send coming from Outlook itself. There is a choice in the Outlook options screen called Send Immediately when connected and the option is on by default. When this option is on, Outlook will kick of a spooler cycle and do a Transport Send immediately after sending the message if a spooler cycle is needed. If the option to Send Immediately when connected is turned off, then the message will only be sent according to the defined send/receive settings. Since the send/receive settings, by default, do not include the Exchange Account for cached mode, it can be pretty easy to have a send/receive definition that you do not expect. So it s important to examine the send/receive settings and make sure the expected definitions exist for how often you want to send mail. Below is the screenshot showing the Send Immediately option.

6 As a summary of this section, here is the way Outlook thinks about how a message gets submitted and delivered: 1. Is this new message I am sending based in an online Outbox folder or an OST/PST folder? If it s online, route the submission through the Exchange Store Send code. If it is OST/PST, route the submission though the Transport Send code. 2. After submitting the message, do a bunch of checks to see if either this is a straight Transport Send, or one of the special case Store Sends that need the spooler. If either of these is true, then kick off a spooler cycle to do the Transport Send. 3. If this was an OST/PST based send, then do the work to move the item from the Outbox folder to the Sent Items folder, and send any NDRs that have occurred. SUBMISSION STATE During the time that the message is submitted, but not delivered, it is in an unusual state. The submitted state shows up in a few ways. The message in the Outbox is rendered in italics. Also, you cannot delete the message in the normal way by simply deleting it from the UI. Being in the submitted state is special. More importantly, since there is some amount of time between being submitted and being delivered, that is an opportunity for something to abort the submission for the message. This happens sometimes from add-ins and external MAPI programs. Sometimes these other components are monitoring the Outbox folder for items to act on and they grab the Outbox message and abort the submission accidently. If something aborts the submission, the message stays in the Outbox folder until something else submits it again. In the

7 troubleshooting section, there is information about the MFCMAPI.EXE tool. This tool can be used to examine the submission state flags, abort a submission, or resubmit a message. So it is a good tool for learning about the submission state. THE OUTBOX Next in our quest to understand this topic are some ideas and concepts around the Outbox folder. From a base level concept, it is the folder in which new messages are created. This creates an interesting design when autosave kicks in (or when you manually save an unsent message), because when you do this, the message is SAVED to the drafts folder. One important fact to consider is that there is a fundamental difference between a message being delivered, and the removal of that message from the Outbox folder. They are two different things, and they are not atomic (it s perfectly fine for one to happen and not the other). For this reason, one of the first questions you always want to answer when troubleshooting stuck in the Outbox folder issues is whether the recipient actually RECEIVED the . Think of the complete process as two steps: 1. The work to transmit the message to the recipient 2. The copying or deletion of the item in the Outbox to somewhere else For step 2, most often the message is moved to the Sent Items folder, but you can specify an option to not save the sent item, and in the working scenario, the sent message is just deleted from the Outbox folder. Again these two steps are completely different code paths in Outlook, and it is not extremely rare for one to work and the other to fail. So for example, if the recipient successfully receives the message, but it still shows present in the Outbox folder, that means step 2 only failed and you should troubleshoot those issues, not the delivery code. One of the main reasons for the detailed description of Store Send and Transport Send above was because that process defines how the removal from the Outbox happens. In the Store Send case, the Exchange Server does the removal from the Outbox folder and the move to the Sent Items folder on the server side. Outlook need not be running for that to happen successfully, and Outlook typically cannot cause or fix problems related to the Exchange work here. If you re in the Store Send scenario, and mails are stuck in the Outbox folder, the best place to start troubleshooting is on the server side. On the other hand, if you are in the more typical Transport Send configuration, Outlook (the spooler) does the work of removing the outgoing item from the Outbox folder and moving a copy to the Sent Items folder. Problems with items being delivered but not removed from the Outbox folder in the Transport Send configuration are typically client side issues and should be investigated at the Outlook level. SYNCHRONIZATION Continuing our investigation of the Outbox folder, our next peculiarity is that this folder is not part of the synchronization engine. Consider the scenario where you do not SEND mail, but you just drag and drop 10 messages into your Outbox in cached mode Outlook. If this were any other folder, you would expect in a few

8 seconds those messages would be synchronized to the mailbox, and the folder in the mailbox would have 10 new messages. If you do that with the Outbox folder, you never get 10 messages in the server Outbox folder. The Outbox folder is not part of sync except in one small corner case. To understand that corner case, we must consider a feature added to Outlook 2007 that is referred to as the sendone feature. In versions of Outlook before 2007, when you sent a message, the message would actually be transmitted over the wire twice; one time during message submission, and then again when the item was synchronized up from the Sent Items folder. Consider this scenario: 1. You create a mail message and attach a significant file, perhaps a 10 MB video file. 2. You send the message MB goes over the wire to the Exchange Server for submission. 3. Outlook sends the send the mail now command to Exchange and then moves the item from Outbox to Sent Items. 4. The sync engine kicks in and sees a new MB message in the sent item and synchronizes it up to the mailbox. Now you have sent MB of data just to send the message. To solve this problem, Outlook and Exchange agreed on a clever trick to allow the two to work together and not have to send the message over the wire twice. This is the sendone feature. It works like this: 1. During submission, Outlook stamps a special property on the message with information that tells Exchange how to make a copy of the message on the server side. 2. Exchange, after receiving the message for submission, makes a copy (conceptually in the Outbox server side). 3. Outlook marks the new message that you just created as NOT NEW. This tells the sync engine to not blindly sync it up to the server. 4. Outlook then moves the message to the Sent Items folder and the sync engine sends up the command that says this message has moved to the Sent Items folder. 5. Exchange gets the sync and since it has that special copy of the message in its Outbox, it moves the message server side to the Sent Items folder. In this way, the sent item is never sent over the wire. This is a clever design and saves a LOT of network bandwidth, but you can see there are a couple of places where things can go wrong. If Outlook tells Exchange in step 1 the wrong information on how to make a copy of the message, then later when the move sync happens, Exchange will not find a matching message and be unable to move the item server side from Outbox to Sent Items. This will show up as stuck in the Outbox folder. Likewise, if you have a failure in the sync process in step 4, the server will not know to move the item server side. In these cases, the message is stuck in the Outbox folder when looking online, but looks fine in the OST folder in cached mode. Finally, you have to sync at least once for this to work at all. It is possible to send an , and then exit very quickly before the sync in step 4 happens. In that case, since no sync

9 happened, the server leaves the copy of the message in the server Outbox folder. The next time you sync successfully everything works, but until you sync once the message stays in the Outbox folder. Consider this relatively common scenario: You have a machine at home running cached mode and a machine at work running online mode. As you leave for work, you send a quick piece of mail and exit Outlook before the sync of the Sent Items happens. At this point the mail has been delivered, but server side is still in the Outbox folder. You get to work and notice a message stuck in the Outbox folder. It just never goes away. Finally 4 days later you happen to be working at home again and use Outlook long enough for a sync to happen. The next day at work you see that the Outbox folder is empty. The sync has successfully sent the message to Exchange to move the item to Sent Items in the mailbox. Or another common scenario: You want to keep any mail you send with budget in the subject in a special folder called Budget Audit. Every time you send a mail like this, immediately after sending, you go and manually copy the message to the Budget Audit folder before the sync engine kicks in. Now there is no sent item to force the sendone sync to happen the right way and the copy of the message is left in the Outbox folder on the server. As part of this design, one corner case was added to the synchronization of the Outbox folder. As was mentioned earlier, in general the Outbox folder is NOT ever part of sync. The one exception is for delete operations. If you have a rogue or unexpected item in the OST Outbox folder, and you manually delete the item, then that will delete the item in the server mailbox as well. This is just a corner case to try to make the Outbox folder behave with more consistency. Again, in all cases where the move to Sent Items fails, the message actually *IS* delivered. So message stuck in the Outbox folder does NOT necessarily mean the message was not delivered. THE SPOOLER CYCLE Now that we understand the importance of the spooler to mail delivery, here are some components that help us understand that process in greater detail. Each Account in your mail configuration has an associated message store (for Exchange it is the mailbox for online mode, the OST for cached mode, if you have a POP/SMTP account it might be a PST file, etc.). Each message store keeps track of Messages in the Outbox in a place internally referred to as the Outgoing Messages Queue. When the spooler cycle starts, it asks each account to look in its corresponding message store and gather up the list of outgoing messages. Then it goes

10 through the messages and submits them to the appropriate transport for delivery. In considering this design, you can see that if there are any problems interacting with the message store, they might manifest as mail delivery problems. Consider this example: 1. The spooling cycle starts and asks each account for their outgoing messages. 2. One account says that it s using D:\DATA\TESTONE.OST for its message store. 3. Something has deleted testone.ost from the d:\data folder. In this case, the attempt to gather up the outgoing messages for that account will fail. Interestingly, having ONE message store give an error does not show up as an overt error in Outlook. The spooler will just continue to look at other accounts/stores and if they work and have messages to send, it will seem like the mail delivery process worked. So it can be hard to see an error when the error happens during the outgoing messages collection. The next part of understanding the big picture of successfully delivering an is to understand another feature provided by MAPI. The developers of MAPI built in a way for MAPI applications to do work during idle time on the computer. Idle time essentially means that you are not typing or moving the mouse around. Now computer time is not as expensive as real time, and there are lots of things that the computer can do with pretty small amounts of idle time. So we are not talking about having to have your hands off the computer for an hour at a time. We are talking about less than a second of idle time sometimes to give MAPI a chance to do some work. So what s the big deal about this? The automatic spooling cycles are all idle time tasks. In almost all instances, when something thinks it s time to do a spooler cycle (for example, Cached Mode and the Send immediately option, you pressing the Send/Receive button, a normal 15 minute Send/Receive cycle happening, etc.), the spooling cycle is added to the idle tasks queue. This means for the actual processing of spooling to happen, you MUST have some idle time on the machine. As was mentioned before, idle time slices are very small, and you almost ALWAYS have plenty of them in normal operations of the computer. In fact MANY different tasks run during idle time, not just the spooling cycle. That said, the use of the MAPI idle feature to drive the spooling cycle leads to two very real possible problems: 1. If any of the OTHER idle time tasks have a problem, they can clog up the idle queue and cause anything waiting to run during idle to not run. 2. System components like keyboard and mouse drivers can prevent the machine from ever getting idle time. Consider this example: You have a mouse driver for your computer that is an advanced driver and tries to add a feature set to make your mouse better in some way. Even when you don t move the mouse, and your hands are off the computer, the mouse driver sends a mouse status message to Windows every.0001 seconds. MAPI now thinks you never have any idle time. It seems as if the mouse is ALWAYS in USE. The spooler cycle may not ever start and mail is not delivered. Incidentally, this is a very REAL cause of a failure to download the Offline Address Book, which is another MAPI idle time task.

11 ADDRESS TYPES The next topic to cover for a full understanding of the mail delivery process is the notion of address types. Historically, these were more important in the design of . Today with the proliferation of Exchange and Internet Mail, almost all of the other types are seen less commonly. Each address that you send to is composed of two different pieces of data in the MAPI world, the address and the address type. Consider these examples: Display Name: John Doe Address: [email protected] Address Type: SMTP Display Name: Jane Doe Address: /O=Contoso/OU=North/cn=Recipients/cn= Address Type: EX A little-remembered fact in MAPI is that when you create an , you can use the canonical form to specify any address type you want. For example, if entered on the To line: [mytype:first last server store] Is a recipient that would be treated like this: Address: first last server store Address Type: mytype Now by specifying an address of mytype, that means you must have a transport that will deliver messages to recipients of mytype. A more common example of the additional address types would be seen when using a FAX transport. If you have a MAPI transport installed that will take your message and render/deliver it as a FAX, then it registers itself as handler for FAX address types. Therefore when you address a message like this: To: [FAX: ] The FAX transport understands this address type and delivers the mail (which in this case means rasterizing it into an image and sending the image over the phone, most likely). Now let s talk about how this fits into the rest of the big picture. When Outlook logs onto the Exchange Server, some configuration is traded between the two. One thing that Exchange sends down to Outlook is the list of address types for delivery to be completed. There are almost always at least three address types in the basic list: EX SMTP X400 Whatever is in the list is what you can deliver mail to using the Exchange transport. Note that you might have another transport service installed that can deliver to other types. So for example if you have a third party fax transport installed, you might still use it to successfully send an to [fax: ]. The list that comes from

12 the Exchange Server is just the list that Exchange knows how to handle. So again we have to think how that might show up in a problem scenario. Consider this scenario: 1. Outlook connects to Exchange and asks for the list of address types. 2. Due to a glitch on the Exchange Server, the list comes back empty. 3. Now if you try to do a Transport Send in Outlook, it will always fail. Outlook believes that the Exchange Server cannot deliver to any address types. It is not easy to see the address types listed anywhere in Outlook, but there is one troubleshooting log that will give an indication that things are probably ok in this area and we will cover that log in detail in the troubleshooting section. NON_DELIVERY REPORTS (NDRS) We discussed earlier the notion of the two different fundamental send methods. One important difference to understand is how NDRs are generated in each scenario. For the Store Send method, where Outlook and the spooler are NOT involved, NDRs are generated by the Exchange Server. For the Transport Send, NDRs are often generated by the spooler, and as we know, Outlook is the spooler. The point remains, if you get an NDR from a Store Send, you must troubleshoot the Exchange side of the process. If you get and NDR from a Transport Send, then something client side can be contributing to the problem. TROUBLESHOOTING/ISSUES This section contains information about troubleshooting and will help your understanding of mail submission/delivery problems. TRANSPORT LOGGING The entire spooling process is logged to a troubleshooting log named OPMLog.log. Logging is enabled using the standard UI option in the Advanced pane of the main Outlook Options dialog:

13 This log is created in the Outlook Logging folder which is a folder under the system temp folder. The log contains detailed information about the spooling/transport process. Note that this logging is not limited to MAPI/Exchange Server logging. If you have an Outlook profile with only an SMTP/POP transport, that traffic will be logged in this file as well. Any mail transport that sends mail will show up in this logging. The logging will include among other things: The subject of the mail being sent The attempt to logon to the transport Any errors received during logon or transmission of the message In the Exchange case, the number of address types to which Exchange can deliver mail In the POP/SMTP case, many details about the download/sending conversation Appendix A has an example OPMLog.log file with annotations on the important pieces of information in the file. SYNCHRONIZATION ISSUES FOLDER MESSAGES The Synchronization Issues folder typically only has messages when something went WRONG during sync. If no errors were encountered, no message is created in the folder. And yet to troubleshoot the sendone process, we need to know when the Sent Items folder successfully synchronizes a message. Outlook provides a registry value to save sync messages in the Sync Issues folder EVEN IF THERE ARE NO ERRORS. The registry value is named AlwaysSaveSyncLog and the key is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Outlook\OST.

14 WARNING: Do not leave this registry value enabled for any length of time. It will create a message in the Sync Issues folder EVERYTIME a successfully sync cycle happens, which is very often in the cached mode configuration. This will generate a lot of noise messages and people will complain if you forget to turn it off. With the option set to always save the sync logs, you will be able to check for the Sent Items sync and confirm whether it is happening, and you will see that items are being added to the online store. Appendix B has examples of what the sync issues messages look like in these scenarios. REGISTRY SETTINGS There are several other registry settings that affect the mail submission/delivery process in a substantial way. Here is a table with the registry value and a comment on how they are related to Outbox folder issues: Registry Value Key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Options\Mail Value: Send Mail Immediately Comment As mentioned earlier, cached mode does not use the Send/Receive settings to schedule mail delivery. That means that without something special, when you send a message, nothing would start the spooling cycle. This value is the same as the UI option for Send Immediately When Connected and tells Outlook in cached mode to start a spooler cycle immediately after you hit Send. If this value is set to 0, mail sends won t happen until a later time and seem to be stuck in the Outbox folder. HKCU \Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Preferences DelegateSentItemsStyle This is a tricky setting. There is no UI choice for it, so it is only set via the registry setting. To understand the setting, we need understand what a delegate is. For this explanation, a delegate is a user that has permission to send on behalf of another user AND has permission to the other user s folders. We will use the word Owner to represent the other user. So the delegate has ability to send mail on behalf of the owner. This value tells Outlook whether to move the sent item to the delegate s Sent Items folder or to the owner s Sent Items folder. This is a big deal under the hood because Outlook has to be able to open the mailbox to get to the Sent Items of the owner. It takes a specific set of permissions, and can have complexity depending on whether you are in cached or online mode. It also affects the mail sending process because during the gathering of the messages to be sent, Outlook must do some work related to this delegate/owner configuration. If anything goes wrong during that work, the mail submission/delivery will show some kind of failure. Key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\MailSettings Value: StrictAccountOrder Very rarely used legacy registry key that will prevent Outlook from ever doing a Store Send. Even if you meet all the other requirements such as online mode, no additional transports, etc., if you have this registry value, you force a Transport Send.

15 MFCMAPI (RECIPIENT PROPERTIES, PROFILE SECTIONS, SUBMIT FLAGS AND ABORTSUBMIT, ETC) My coworker and MAPI guru, Stephen Griffin, maintains the definitive MAPI troubleshooting tool. The formal name is Microsoft MAPI Editor. For historical reasons, many people just call it by the executable name, MFCMAPI. The latest version is always available at the main download location. Below is a screenshot showing the use of MFCMAPI to interrogate recipient properties for a message s recipient. I am showing in the property pane that we are looking at an Exchange type. Not only does MFCMAPI allow for complete interrogation of MAPI stuff, Stephen has integrated parsers for many of Outlook and MAPI s binary structures. So for example, you can use MFCMAPI to dump the contents of the binary nickname cache, which is data that might affect addressing and sending mail. The uses for MFMAPI in terms of troubleshooting Outbox folder issues are many. For example: List and interrogate properties of the MAPI Transport Services List and view/change recipient properties Submit or abort the submission of a message Check the message flags to see if it is in the submitted state

16 OTHER RESOURCES KB Article describing the SendOne Feature KB Article describing DelegateSentItemsStyle KB Article describing gotchas with the DelegateSentItemsStyle Blog Post with info on fixing stuck messages including issues with Icloud Transport KB Article describing the StrictAccountOrder Setting APPENDIX A SAMPLE OPMLOG.LOG FILE Log Entry Comment :16:36 <<<< Logging Started (level is LTF_TRACE) >>>> :16:36 HELPER::Initialize called :16:36 Initializing: Finding a Transport :16:36 MAPI XP Call: XPProviderInit in EMSMDB.DLL, hr = 0x :16:36 MAPI XP Call: TransportLogon, hr = 0x d This is a normal error and should be ignored. This is because the first logon attempt is done with anonymous credentials which do not work :16:36 MAPI XP Call: Shutdown, hr = 0x :16:36 MAPI XP Call: XPProviderInit in EMSMDB.DLL, hr = 0x :16:36 MAPI Status: ( / ) :16:36 MAPI XP Call: TransportLogon, hr = 0x Here the logon succeeds and the Mapi Transport is ready to be used :16:36 Initializing: Found a transport, Error code = 0x :16:36 MAPI XP Call: AddressTypes, hr = 0x , caddrs = 3, cuids = 1 Notice the Count of Address here. If this was 0, all Mail submissions would fail. This shows the default set of 3 address types (EX, SMTP, X400) :16:36 MAPI XP Call: RegisterOptions, hr = 0x , coptions = :16:36 MAPI Status: (IN /OUT ) :16:36 MAPI XP Call: TransportNotify(BEGIN_IN BEGIN_OUT), hr = 0x :16:36 HELPER::Initialize done, Error code = 0x :16:36 HELPER::GetCapabilities called, Error code = 0x :03:35 Microsoft Exchange: Synch operation started (flags = ) :03:35 Microsoft Exchange: UploadItems: 1 messages to send Indication that there ARE messages to send. Conceptually, the process of getting outgoing messages has happened and this is the result :03:35 EXECUTING Put MAPI TASK :03:35 Starting the Spooling Cycle Spooler Cycle is Happening :03:35 MAPI Status: (IN /OUT fl ---) :03:35 MAPI XP Call: FlushQueues, hr = 0x , ulflushflags = 0x a :03:35 Sending one message :03:35 Progress: Sending message 'Watch for this message' (size 4.14 KBytes) Subject of the message so it is easy to track problem messages :03:35 MAPI Status: (IN /OUT fl act) :03:36 MAPI Status: (IN /OUT fl ---) :03:36 MAPI XP Call: SubmitMessage, hr = 0x SubmitMessage WORKED!!! :03:36 MAPI XP Call: EndMessage, hr = 0x :03:36 FINISHED MAPI TASK :03:36 Microsoft Exchange: ReportStatus: RSF_COMPLETED, hr = 0x

17 :03:36 Microsoft Exchange: Synch operation completed :03:36 Sending done, Error code = 0x :03:36 Sending done, Error code = 0x f Normal Error and Can be Ignored :03:36 MAPI Status: (IN /OUT ) :03:36 Finishing the Spooling Cycle, Error code = 0x Spooler Cycle Completed with No Errors :04:10 Microsoft Exchange: Synch operation started (flags = ) :04:10 Microsoft Exchange: UploadItems: 1 messages to send :04:10 EXECUTING Put MAPI TASK :04:10 Starting the Spooling Cycle :04:10 MAPI Status: (IN /OUT fl ---) :04:10 MAPI XP Call: FlushQueues, hr = 0x , ulflushflags = 0x a :04:10 Sending one message :04:10 Progress: Sending message 'This should generate an NDR' (size 3.85 KBytes) Subject of the second message :04:10 MAPI Status: (IN /OUT fl act) :04:10 MAPI Status: (IN /OUT fl ---) :04:10 MAPI XP Call: SubmitMessage, hr = 0x Submit Message returned a REAL Error :04:10 MAPI XP Call: SubmitMessage returned MAPI_E_NOT_ME. MAPI_NOT_ME means this transport cannot deliver to this type of address :04:10 FINISHED MAPI TASK :04:11 Microsoft Exchange: ReportStatus: RSF_COMPLETED, hr = 0x :04:11 Microsoft Exchange: Synch operation completed :04:11 Sending done, Error code = 0x :04:11 Sending done, Error code = 0x f Normal expected error :04:11 MAPI Status: (IN /OUT ) :04:11 Finishing the Spooling Cycle, Error code = 0x The Spooler Cycle finished successfully. Note that an error sending one particular message does NOT mean the spooler cycle failed. It means the one message failed. APPENDIX B SAMPLE SYNCHRONIZATION ISSUES FOLDER MESSAGES OUTBOX, REGULAR SEND: This is the log from a regular send that shows that the Outbox is NOT part of the folder sync during a send: 12:27:44 Synchronizer Version :27:44 Synchronizing Mailbox 'Test Account' 12:27:44 Synchronizing local changes in folder 'Outbox' Outbox Folder, but no message to sync 12:27:44 Uploading to server 'server sampleserver.sample.com' 12:27:44 Done

18 OUTBOX, ROGUE ITEM: This is the log from creating a rogue message in the Outbox that has nothing to do with submitting mail. I just dragged an item into the Outbox folder and then deleted it. Deletions from the Outbox folder are the one corner case where sync does happen. Do not be confused by the error message here. It is expected and normal in modern Exchange scenarios. 12:30:49 Synchronizer Version :30:49 Synchronizing Mailbox 'Test Account' 12:30:49 Synchronizing local changes in folder 'Outbox' 12:30:49 Uploading to server 'server sampleserver.sample.com' 12:30:49 Synchronization of some deletions failed. Normal error for this case. Really just a warning that either there was no message to delete server side, or the deletion will be done async and Exchange tells Outlook that it doesn t know if it worked yet or not. 12:30:49 [0-130] This is just the error code for the above error. 12:30:49 1 item(s) deleted in online folder 12:30:49 Done SENT ITEMS, REGULAR SEND: This is an example of the successful sync of the Sent Items during the sendone process. It would be great if the logs showed this as a MOVE and not a full item upload, but at least they show that the sync happened. 12:27:56 Synchronizer Version :27:56 Synchronizing Mailbox 'Test Account' 12:27:56 Synchronizing local changes in folder 'Sent Items' Sent Items folder 12:27:56 Uploading to server 'server sampleserver.sample.com' 12:27:57 1 item(s) added to online folder One item sync d up 12:27:57 Downloading from server 'server sampleserver.sample.com' 12:27:57 Done

19 APPENDIX C DIFFERENCES BETWEEN STORE AND TRANSPORT SEND This table summarizes the differences between the Store Send and Transport Send methods. Topic Store Send Transport Send Cached Mode Send method No Yes Online Mode Send method Copying from Outbox to Sent Items folder Send Immediately When Connected Maybe, depending on other options Done by the Exchange Server Not needed in basic Store Send Maybe, depending on other options Almost always done by the Outlook client Must be done to start a spooling cycle so the mail is sent now instead of on the send/receive schedule Requires the spooler to run No Yes NDR generation Done by the Exchange Server Done by Outlook OR the Exchange Server depending on the type of NDR Requires sync to work correctly so that Sent Items work right No Yes Address Type importance MAPI provider that does the work Send/Receive group settings No, Address Types are known and used when needed by the server Emsmdb32.dll (The Exchange MAPI provider) Not important since no spooler cycle is needed to send the mail Yes Valid address types must have been retrieved from the server during logon and be available and present to Outlook Mspst32.dll (The OST/PST MAPI Provider) Could be controlling the send schedule if you do not use the Send Immediately when Connected option