Shared Mailboxes or Calendars not updating since mid Jan 2022 unless disable Shared Mailbox Caching

[gblackburn]

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 

[#2]

Office 365 Current Channel 2201 v.14827.20158 released. No mention of a fix for this issue in the release notes.

[#3]

@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.  

[#4]

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.

[#5]

@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 client

[#6]

Any update on a fix for this ? this is affecting a number of users at our company and is proving disruptive.

[#7]

@Danturner101 

Current status: We've determined via our analysis of affected databases associated with Outlook user profiles that we don't have sufficient evidence delineating how data is actively corrupted to conclusively determine the precise source of impact. While we're continuing to determine the best methodology required to collect this diagnostic data, we've verified via internal testing and with some affected users that impacted mailboxes can effectively resolve the issue by creating new Outlook profiles for users, following the steps outlined in this document https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-an-outlook-profile-f544c1ba-3352-4b3b-be0b-8d42a54...

I'm testing this now, but I have little faith...

MS is severely underestimating this problem and its impact

[#8]

Create new Outlook profiles for affected users? Sure. Is Microsoft going to send a rep to run around and do this for every affected user in my organization? Even though the individual could do these steps themselves they will not and want someone from I.T. to do it for them and Ain't nobody got time for dat!

[#9]

Agreed. Still, the workaround does seem to work. Testing with 2 users now

[#10]

@MRBoelen 

Hmm this seems to apply to Microsoft Outlook desktop etc right? I'm experiencing this issue using outlook.com - I don't use the desktop software.

[#11]

This is awesome good job M$!
Hardcore start to the year.

First the domain controllers (2012R2, 2016, 2019)

were killed by the epic security update causing them to reboot in circles requiring safe mode to uninstall.

Then the super update for terminal servers making them literally terminal.... Untill you uninstall it..

On 2013 office the ms upload center is crashing on launch with every single run.

Never versions can't sync shared mailboxes or Calendars.
As a bonus, some users have a never ending 'retrieving info from exchange' when they receive an image in the body of an email.

Absolutely great job on the updates in 2022 gotta love how little attention they give to any of these too.

All we have are workarounds involving mostly re-creating the users mail profile which works for a week or so untill the issue comes back.

Care to advise how should we tell users not to ask for alternative solutions for emails when all you can provide them with are mediocre workarounds with their issues returning ?

Seems the real solution is to not use Microsoft products in the first place.

Why is it always such a nightmare when you have to keep MS products updated...

[#12]

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.

[#13]

Same issue occurring in my organization reported from Jan 24th

[#14]

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.

[#15]

Our organization has been seeing this as well. Disabling and reenabling cached mode does not solve the problem. Leaving cached mode off entirely or only disabling it for shared folders only is a fix, but for users with mailboxes >10GB it has been a nightmare. We do not consider disabling cached mode to be a permanent fix in our environment. Has anyone been able to figure out a permanent fix that allows for cached mode to remain enabled?

[#16]

@dptg-noah re-create the outlook profile of the affected users. Again a workaround. I would suggest to also flag it in your O365 admin portal. The more it gets flagged, the higher it will get pushed in the O365 engineering team.

[#17]

@Jurgen Van Duvel When we tried to fix this using SARA, it created a new profile. This did not rectify the problem. I actually did report the problem on February 8th in our O365 admin portal, but the status was changed to "No issue found".

We enable "shared mailbox" functionality via mailbox delegation permissions ("Read and manage", "Send as", "Send on behalf of"). I do not know if this is technically the same exact thing as the shared mailbox discussion here, but we are seeing the same exact problem everyone here is describing and creating a new profile, disabling/reenabling cached mode, and removing/readding the mailbox delegation permissions has not resolved the problem thus far. Only keeping cached mode disabled works.

[#18]

@dptg-noah look up this incident EX316072, Exchange Online,

At the moment it's flagged ad 'investigation suspended'

[#19]

Try clearing offline files in the affected folders in the shared mailbox. That appears to have helped but we only use the Inbox and it's not huge.

[#20]

@gblackburn Hi, experiencing the same here for our enquiries and accounts team who share mailboxes.  I haven't found a setting for turning off cached shared mailboxes only.  The cache seems to be for the user's whole mailbox. Be really interested to see a fix from Microsoft.

[#21]

@gblackburn We have experienging the same issue. We have created a case in Microsoft as well.