Deleted folders in outlook keep reappearing

[upsilona]

Hi,

My MD uses outlook to access his mail, he has offline folders setup to syncronise when he's online. There are 3 folders which were subfolders of his inbox which he deleted about 3 months ago.
Every few days these folders keep reapppearing in his mailbox. I thought it might be corruption in his offline folders, so I deleted them and recreated them, but its still happening. We have no email retention policies setup on Exchange.

We use Exchange 5.5 srvpck 4

Any help will be greatly appreciated as I can find nothing about this problem anywhere.

 

[brontosaurus]

does he only use this one PC? No laptop, or home machine that may also access your server?

 

[upsilona]

His machine is a laptop, he uses offline mail when hes offsite, but he only ever accesses the server with this one laptop.

 

[zoeythecat]

Do these folders appear while he connects to outlook "offline" or do the folders appear when he is connected "online"? I assume when he takes his laptop home he chooses to work "offline" and the folders appear then? If this is the case then his profile is not synchronizing properly or his ost file needs to be recreated. I would try this first:

(1) Open up his outlook profile properties (i.e, right click on outlook, properties, show profiles.
(2) Click on "properties" of his profile, then "exchange server" properties, then "advanced" tab.
(3) At the bottom of the "advanced" tab there are "offline folder file" settings. Click on this and then "disable offline use". This will bring you out to the Advanced tab again. Click on the "offline folder file" settings again and create a different file name in the file window. Click "ok" and you will be asked to create the file.
(4) Also make sure "enable offline" use is checked.
(5) Under the "general" tab make sure "Manually Control Connection state" and "choose the connection type" and "connect to the network" are checked.
(6) Connect to outlook and manually run the synchronization process for all folders in outlook.
(7) the next time he connects to oulook by "working offline" will hopefully resolve this issue with him seeing those 3 folders again.

 

[upsilona]

The folders reappear when he's online, not when hes offline. I have already tried deleting his .ost file and recreating it, but the folders still reappeared 3 days later

 

[zoeythecat]

Maybe there is some sort of corruption on his mailbox. You could try:

(1) Exporting his email to a Pst file
(2) Delete his Exchange Mailbox
(3) Recreated mailbox
(4) Import mail from the PST file from step1