Dear Team members,
I had a chance to work on a strange issue. I have scanned over the net but this problem is no where documented, not even on the Microsoft sites. So thought of sharing it with you all.
Problem:User is unable to set Out of Office (OOF) from Outlook client, error - Your Out of Office settings cannot be displayed, because the server is currently unavailable. Try again later.
Symptoms:
- From OWA user was able to set OOF.
- Not a machine or Outlook version specific issue as it was reproducible from different machine and Outlook versions.
- Autodiscover was failing for this user with error code - 0x800C8203.
- A new mailbox was also giving to the affected user but still no go.
Root Cause:
The user’s Primary SMTP address was - abc.x&y@domain.com
Outlook & Exchange don’t understand characters like ‘&’. They assume this to be some code so its ignored.
For more information refer the below link,
Characters that are not supported for object names in Exchange
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841091
Here is what happend when Outlook was launch to config. the profile automatically,
1) When Outlook was launched; it automatically found the logged in user’s SMTP address as - abc.x&y@domain.com
2) After hitting the Next; When searching for the mailbox, it removed the ‘&’ from the SMTP.
3) The below error was pop up,
4) Autodiscover logs showed the below strings,
6224 0x1FC3C268 06/05/13 19:58:23 Autodiscover tohttps://cas.domain.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml Failed(0x800C8203)
6224 0x1FC3C268 06/05/13 19:58:23 Autodiscover tohttps://domain.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml starting
6408 0x1FC3DA74 06/05/13 19:58:29 GetLastError=12002; httpStatus=0.
However, manually we were able to config. The profile since we were using the Alias.
Solution:
- Added the Primary SMTP for the user as - abc.x.y@domain.com
- Made the old SMTP address as Secondary - abc.x&y@domain.com
This way user was able to use Out of Office from Outlook and were also able to receive emails from their old email address.