Forum Discussion
Shared Mailboxes or Calendars not updating since mid Jan 2022 unless disable Shared Mailbox Caching
Hello.
We're an MSP and since around 17th/18th Jan we've had one or two users in 7 different companies (tenants) report issues with shared mailboxes or shared calendars they have access to not updating.
We've been able to get working again by simply unticking option in Outlook profile to cache shared mailboxes.
But with this amount of clients with the same issue, I've not been able to see anything regarding known M365 health / windows update issue that causes this in the last few days. Anyone else seen this issue and know root cause or have any acknowledgement of known issue
52 Replies
- UN-checking "Download shared folders" continues to be the #1 fix for many Outlook issues. Over the years, and even still today. It should be set to UN-check org-wide in every organization, minus exceptions where for some reason it MUST be checked. Otherwise, always UN-check it.
It has always caused issues. It always will cause issues. Cached Mode is great, but only for the primary mailbox of any added accounts. Nothing else.
Any concerns about performance due to NOT caching shared folders will be trumped by all the mysterious Outlook issues that will simply vanish.
The most commonly impacted people in this topic are admin assistants who have to manage bigwig's stuff for them. Those bigwigs are reckless with their mailbox content and the admin assistants have to feel all the pain, usually via the "Download Shared Folders" setting being checked. Admin assistants feel like they've won the lottery after you turn that setting off. The bigwigs also stop getting upset about their missing meetings or otherwise-corrupt-somehow Calendar/Contact items. - Same issue occurring in my organization reported from Jan 24th
- Question: Would turning my shared mailbox into an actual email account resolve this?
I have 1 sup that assigns orders all day to 12 reps from a shared mailbox. Yes, MS should fix this mess of course, just looking for options / temp fixes like everyone else.
greatly appreciate all the temp fixes posted, which has kept things alive. Any update on this? Causing a lot of disruption for one of my customers. No mention of it on latest update on 26th Jan so i'm hesitant to switch back to cached mode just yet.
TJMSP It's being tracked now as a service disruption.
Service Degradation for Exchange Online: EX316072 - Users' shared mailboxes aren't automatically refreshing for new email in the Outlook desktop clientAny update on a fix for this ? this is affecting a number of users at our company and is proving disruptive.
- Office 365 Current Channel 2201 v.14827.20158 released. No mention of a fix for this issue in the release notes.
bwilkerson217 This needs to be fixed, Microsoft. This is clearly a bad update with Office. Older versions aren't affected, unfortunately plenty of our staff are running the affected version.
gblackburn We're having the same issue too accross lots of mailboxes, we do not have the IT resource to go around and manually rebuild all the profiles, or change the cached mode, we need an urgent fix!
Experiencing the same behavior since mid Jan indeed. Seems clearly a bug, as it's getting more widespread. Unchecking 'use cached mode' fixes it, but that's not a real solution.
- Started experiencing this about a week and a half ago. That it was just a fluke but it is definitely a lot more widespread. Had to resolve it for about half a dozen users using the unticking/reticking. So far that fix is holding up, so crossing my fingers. It is not just some coincidence. Either a recent Office update caused this or something on the backend. Hopefully Microsoft can issue a patch like they did for the VPN issue we saw recently.
- Exactly the same problem here, seems to be getting worse and spreads out through my organization
I managed to fix the problem by manually going to the few people who had the issue, removed the "Download shared folders" tick under Advanced in Account management, close Outlook and open it up again. Then going back intro the same settings and switch it back on again. This will start a sync of the Shared mailbox back to the OST file and update automatically again. Hope this helps until we know why this started happening.
- EmileSteenkamp This was my workaround when I posted the question but you have made in clear for anyone who comes here.
As of 19/1 (but I did not see visibility of this till 22/1) it looks like this has now appeared in the public domain as an M365 issue. So we await a Microsoft fix with another suggested workaround below:
January 21, 2022 11:16 PM
Title: A small percentage of users' shared mailboxes aren't automatically refreshing new email in the Outlook desktop client
User Impact: Users' shared mailboxes aren't automatically refreshing for new email in the Outlook desktop client.
More info: While we're focused on remediation, users that have access to Outlook on the web can use this connection method to bypass this problem. Some affected users have reported that manually refreshing their folders using key shortcuts, such as pressing F9 or CTRL + M, may result in intermittent success as well.
Current status: We're continuing to review Fiddler trace logs and are in the process of gathering additional Time Travel Debugging (TTD) traces from our internal reproduction of the issue to provide insight into the cause of this problem and identify possible mitigation options.
Scope of impact: A small percentage of users aren’t seeing their shared mailboxes automatically refresh.
- gblackburn - our law firm is having the same issues, started around Jan 11. We have multiple users accessing a user account. Started having issues with employees unable to search and new items not appearing in the inbox. Have unchecked the "download shared folders" cache for most users and it was ok for awhile, but now we are seeing everything from deleted emails reappearing in the inbox, to draft emails disappearing, to the inability to change a category on an email and have it stick, and searching remains an issue. Not all users are experiencing the same problems, but almost all of our users are experiencing some issue. This shared mailbox is our incoming email box for all of our workflow and this is causing major efficiency issues for the users and myself having to try to troubleshoot the problem. It is too coincidental for everyone to have the same problem at the same time. Had to be something in the recent update. Help please Microsoft.
