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JMiller317's avatar
JMiller317
Copper Contributor
Apr 25, 2022

Exchange contacts being mass-deleted

We have one user who has had a large portion of his contacts move to his recycle bin.  The first two times it happened in the middle of the night and a thousand or so contacts were deleted within a m...
2013
Exchange Server
Outlook contacts
JeremyTBradshaw's avatar
JeremyTBradshaw
Steel Contributor
Apr 25, 2022

JMiller317 

Hi, this issue reminds me of the ~2010 era when non-Microsoft ActiveSync clients would destroy Exchange server upon each new version of the app(s). And iOS' Mail along the way since then has been notorious for Calendar and Contacts devastation.

I think your best move is to turn on mailbox auditing for that mailbox where the contacts are getting deleted, and that should give you an idea which user, which client app, etc. are causing the deletion. Then from there make decisions on next steps. There is also ActiveSync debug logging which might help, but I think you could save that for next steps and with MS Support involved. If the mailbox auditing logs show you it's that user from that iPhone (or their i*** devices), I would remove and re-setup their accounts in those ActiveSync apps from scratch, but also would insist on updating iOS to the latest in the process.

  • JMiller317's avatar
    JMiller317
    Copper Contributor
    Apr 25, 2022
    Mailbox auditing is a good place to start. Thanks for the suggestion.

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