Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations strongm on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Outlook not updating from Exchange 1

Status
Not open for further replies.

snakeeyes1978

Programmer
Jan 11, 2005
70
AU
I have a really really weird problem here (on some workstations). I have a number of workstations connecting to an Exchange Server using Outlook 2000 (have performed all Office updates).

The problem is that Outlook is not automatically going off to the server and retrieving new mail. Users have to switch to Outlook and click on another folder before Outlook retrieves new mail information from the exchange server.

Weird thing is it is only happening on some workstations, with no apparant differences in configuration or setup.

Has anyone come across this before or have a solution - i'm stumped!
 
I have the same problem. Users have to click on another folder or send/receive to get messages.

I am running Exchange 2000 SP3, with Outlook 2000 on all clients, Symantec Mail Security for Exchange 4.5, Symantec AV Corp. 9.0 on all workstations.
 
Common problem in exchange, and it usually isn't Outlook.

Looks like a problem with your MTA in Exchange. The reason the client (Outlook) doesn't update is that the imc and the mta get their signals crossed, then the information gets out of whack because the imc and the mta are at odds with each other.. If you use a proxy server for your exchange server that can be a cause of this problem.

Other than that, get clients to shut down outlook, restart all exchange services and get users to log back into outlook, the problem will be resolved. I would upgrade your exchange server's service pack to 4 plus the updates to the information store so it can handle office 2000-2003 properly.

Good Luck!
 
We have exchange 5.5 sp 4 and several patches on top. I've solved this problem a few times by removing office 2000 & outlook, rebooting, and reinstalling- then patching from windowsupdate.com
 
Correction: We have Service Pack 4.

Not all users are having this problem. From the 200+ users we have, only 4 or 5 are affected by this.

I shall try to restart exchange services and have all clients to logout.

Thanks for your suggestions
 
This problem is nothing to do with the MTA and IMS "getting their signals crossed". Exchange server uses UDP packets to notify the clients that they have new mail delivery, if you are not seeing your new mail until you refresh the folder view (swapping to a different folder and then back to Inbox is one way of doing this) then there is a problem with the USP packets getting from your server to your clients. Because UDP packets are 'fire and forget' loss of them in transit isn't picked up.

If every client is suffering from this problem, it is usually because the network isn't passing UDP packets - perhaps a router is filtering them, or maybe a VPN tunnel isn't passing them. But if the problem is random, and affects only some of your clients some of the time, it can be because of a busy or noisy network. A less busy, better network would help.

One workaround is to change the new delivery notification process from the UDP broadcast to a client polling system - there is a registry fix for the client that can do this from Office SP3 onwards. More details at:

 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top