Forum Discussion
"Outlook data file cannot be accessed" when trying to send from shared mailbox?
ComotoJC, I was able to fix one of my shared email accounts that had the same issues as you describe. I thought I share what worked for me. I compared the shared mailbox that was not working to a second working shared mailbox and noticed that the working mailbox has two data files compared to the one with the broken mailbox. One is the standard OST, and the second is an NST. After reading this post-https://www.systoolsgroup.com/nst/, I determined it must be the issue.
My fix was to remove the broken shared mailbox from Outlook and add it back. It took Office365 thirty plus minutes to sync up and recreate the data files. Once the sync completed, the broken shared mailbox now had the two data files, and I was able to send an email as the shared mailbox account name.
BTW: Outlook did an automatic restart when it completed the synchronization.
Hope this helps.
Codewriter93 As much as I wanted to avoid it, I just deleted the whole profile. Interestingly I could not delete the shared mailbox account from the profile. Some message about how it had been made the primary and the primary could not be deleted. Odd because that had never been done (aka that email account had not been made the default or anything). I ended up deleting and re-setting-up that entire profile from zero, then adding the shared mailboxes, and now everything works perfectly. I think.
This is odd because its the 3rd-4th time we have attempted that on this windows client and always had some kind of shared mailbox problems, either the one above or in not saving to the shared Sent/Drafts folders even when doing send-as, but for now its finally working (knock on wood).
ComotoJC The one issue that is probably messing you up is the auto-mapping in Office 365. I had to remove all the users from the shared mailbox. I manually entered each user using PowerShell.
Use the cmd -- Add-MailboxPermission "The name of your shared mailbox" -User user1@xxx.com -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType all -AutoMapping $false --
followed by the second command -- Add-RecipientPermission "The name of your shared mailbox" -Trustee user1@xxx.com -AccessRights SendAs -Confirm:$false
You will then have to manually add the mailbox for each user in their Outlook allowing Outlook to sync with Office 365.
If you rely on the automapping to do it all for you it will not work. At least for me.
- This seems to have worked for me! It was giving me some weird issues at first not loading emails, but I made a fresh profile in outlook and added both accounts and it seems good now.
- Agreed the automapping seems to mess things up. Is shocking such a simple frequent feature works so badly with the "flagship" Windows client... When we tried adding the accounts to the Profile thats when I got the original error this thread was about... thought we fixed that with a 're-do' but indeed then we were back to the automapping "default to on behalf" mess.
Microsoft: This is NOT intuitively how people expect this to work! Fix it!Well it continues to be "Fun".
Deleting entire profile and reconfiguring worked for a few hours. Then a "Send As" message went to the Outbox but would just sit there, never actually being sent or trying to send. You could open and edit it as much as you liked but it would never get processed with a Send/Receive.
What was super fun was that Outlook would see it and warn "are you sure you want to exit with items in the outbox!?!?"... but would still refuse to ever try to send it.
Shared mailboxes are a disaster.
