Shared mailbox does not update itself

[Martin Sørensen]

Hello everyone,

So we have like 10 shared mailbox's and none of them are syncing itself. If I move some mails from inbox to another folder in the shared mailbox, I'd have to go to it and click the "update folder" button. 

I'm using Outlook 2016, and it is in here the issue is. 

And in the inbox when new mails are received I need to press update again to get them?

How can I fix this? I have tried so many things...

[#2]

Does it work well in OWA? I'm having lately some customer complains about issues in shared mailboxes

[#3]

10 is a bit too much. Especially if each of them is GBs in size. Configure a separate Outlook profile, or simply access some of them via OWA.

[#4]

Well..

It works in the OWA when you open the shared mailbox for itself..

But on outlook, it doesn't work. Any suggestions to how i can get it to work?

[#5]

In OWA you are accessing it directly, in Outlook you have 9 other mailboxes "battling" for resources.

[#6]

Even we are facing the similar issue. Tried all possible solutions.

1. Creating new outlook profile.

2. Re-installing Outlook Client

3. Correcting folder permissions on shared mailbox

4. Disabling Auto-Mapping

5. Enabling Auto-Mapping

Please advise any possible solution to it.

Thanks.

Regards,

Taher Soni

[#7]

Solution is the same - use OWA or use a separate profile in Outlook for just the shared mailbox. There's only so much Outlook can handle, having multiple shared mailboxes added, each of several GBs worth of email, will cause issues sooner or later.

[#8]

I have only just found this thread, see my similar post here https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365/Shared-folder-sync-issue/m-p/132212#M6850

The solution is to uncheck 'Download shared folders' which forces any shared folders online. This might increase network load so it's worth keeping an eye on performance in general but it seems like background synchronisation doesn't handle shared folders very well. The same applies to delegated mailboxes/calendars etc.

I posted to see if anyone else had encountered this issue but as yet, not received any response.

Thanks

[#9 · Accepted solution]

We ended up with creating a seperate mailbox, and stop using shared mailbox.

I would suggest you to do the same.

Unfortunately Outlook has not been optimized enough to do this probably.

[#10]

We did this and it did'nt work either.

Anyways thanks for trying. 🙂

[#11]

Unchecking 'Download shared folders' - if that doesn't work, then there is another issue because that simply forces the folder to remain always online. I'm just in the process of setting up a deployment with this setting and will check it out again.

[#12]

This worked for me. Thanks for your suggestion!

[#13]

Just wanted to say (and I realize this is almost 1 year later), a large percentage of users HATE OWA and do not want to use it. I personally like OWA just fine, ever since Exchange 2010.

But Microsoft's FastTrack team will advise customers all the time that 10+ mailboxes in Outlook is totally fine (provided their network readiness assessment went well).

It can be frustrating for users, then admins.

[#14]

We can say the same from your comment, Pieter: It's unhelpful and it does not provide any value here. I also think that this community as many others are to help people having a good discussion about alternatives to solve a problem, some of them can be wrong others can be worth and so on...but introducing noise in the conversation and make negative comments in a public forum about a folk such as Vasil that is continuously helping people for free and in his free time it's not worth and totally disrespectful.

[#15]

Thanks @jcgonzalezmartin, much appreciated 🙂

@Pieter Rossouw, First of all, I do not work for Microsoft or represent them in any way, MVPs are *independent*. Thus, my opinions and recommendations are my own, nobody is forcing you to follow them and you are free to disagree or challenge them.

That said, Microsoft's guidance for O365 has always been to use cached mode, and keep the profile size down by limiting the amount of data synced. Having 10 mailboxes in the same profile kinda goes against this guidance, and with this many mailboxes, chances are that you do not need to access them all at the same time. Thus configuring separate profiles or using OWA is perfectly viable option, which will save you some trouble in the long run.

Have you actually tried working in Outlook with 10 mailboxes configured in Online mode, when connected to Exchange Online? I'm sure your experience was stellar.

[#16]

Sorry guys, when I said users hate OWA, I didn't mean to spark this.
I will just say a couple points and hopefully a moderator can delete the mean comments in between.

OWA has the luxury of multiple simultaneous tabs, and this in my opinion does Trump Outlook for dealing with multiple mailboxes. Users need to open their minds more often to realize these things (but they won't, willingly, a lot of the time).

At the same time, Outlook is programmed to do all this enumeration all the time of items and folders. This is where all its limitations are derived from (eg max 10000 items / 500 folders etc.). I feel Microsoft should be redesigning this aspect of Outlook so that it can function just as good as OWA. Heck, they could make Outlook a frontend for OWA. I'm sure there's a lot to it, but I've always wondered why is Outlook so finicky? One answer is that the issues are a part of the need to be able to work offline. And fair enough. BUT, maybe it's time Online Mode (non-cached) gets an overhaul so that it is just an OWA frontend.

I hope I'm making sense. Just trying to say, if OWA can work so well ( not sarcasm, I agree it does), Outlook should be able to keep up.

@VasilMichev I didn't mean my last comment to be hateful. Please don't associate my comment with the mean one that came after. I have lots of respect for you. Plus, even Microsoft Support are recommending OWA or to reduce the size/item count of mailboxes and the total number of mailboxes opened in Outlook. It's more during sales and initial migration that things are sugar-coated, leading to the eventual surprise and unhappy users.

[#17]

Hi Everyone, 

The company I work from changed from normal outlook to office 365 webmail at the end of last year and I'm hating every minute of it.   We only work with 4 shared e-mail boxes and the fact that they still don't update themselves and we need to constantly refresh to see the tags that have been added to the mails or whether we've received a reply its a nightmare and has really impacted our productivity  ( we divide/ assign the e-mails using tags) We have an in house tech support that when presented with this issue basically told me "Sorry,  you just need to constantly refresh, there is nothing  that can be done about it".  I'm not tech savvy enough, so how does this thing about not downloading the share inboxes can be found? Today I spent almost an hour trying to set up some automatic e-mail archiving in subfolders and I still don't know if it worked correctly. 

Thanks in advance. 

[#18]

@Tatiana_Ramirez assuming that you are still using Outlook to access the mailbox, un-ticking Download shared folders option would be the simplest thing to try. In case of no luck you could also try to add the shared mailboxes using a separate Outlook account. Finally, if nothing helps, you can add your Outlook for the Web as PWA, making the user experience a bit more smooth than you would have via web browser.

[#19]

Thanks!!! I tried it out with the colleagues with whom we share the e-mail box and now we can all see the tags in real time 🙂