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After a colleague of mine migrated Exchange for a customer from Exchange on a small business server to Exchange 2016 the dates are messed up when searching. When a user just browses his or her email on their phone, all dates are correct. But when they make a search the date of the search time shows up instead of the actual sent/received time. The mails are also not sorted in the correct order because of this.

This does not appear to happen on a newly created account, but only with the accounts that where migrated from the old server. I've also tested setting up one of the affected accounts on my own iPhone, and experience the same problem. But only for that account. No problems with my own Exchange email that resides on a different server.

When searching in the mailbox through Outlook (both for Mac and Windows) there are no problems, and searching in OWA also works like normal.

Do you have any suggestions for me?

EDIT: I've also inspected the mail headers of some of the emails via OWA, and I'm not finding anything weird.

Harald
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  • How was the email migration done? With a 3rd party software (if yes I have seen that such a software often cause that kind of issues as they miss interpret some values). Or was that done via the [MS mail move approach](http://www.admin-enclave.com/en/articles/exchange/302-move-exchange-2010-2013-user-to-exchange-2016.html)? – BastianW Aug 15 '17 at 09:05
  • The MS mail move approach I think. It was at least not done with any third-party software. – Harald Aug 15 '17 at 09:49
  • Actually, the mails have simply been exported to PST from the old server, and then imported again to the new server on freshly made profiles. – Harald Aug 18 '17 at 16:06
  • ok, I expected that... see my answer below for more details what happened here then... – BastianW Aug 18 '17 at 17:33

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Based on your comments the following happened:

During your "email migration" you / your workmate exported all emails from the older Exchange Server to PST and then imported them from the PST into the new Exchange Server. However during that approach the creation date on the messages is changed (see here). This is mostly due to the reason that they where created inside the PST and therefore got a new date (the send / receive date remains). So after importing the emails again from the PST the new MS Exchange server couldn´t use the old "creation" fields and is using different values fro the emails. The search function isn´t acting on the Send/Received fields when searching (See: Exchange Search indexes a message within about 10 seconds of the message being created).

The "PST migration approach" also explains why it is only happening on "old" elements but not on new ones, as on new ones the time values are the one which are set by the new Exchange system.

Conclusion: The next time when you perform an Exchange migration use a coexistence scenario, then use the Microsoft mail move approach to avoid such issues.

BastianW
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  • I guess you're right. But I find this way of dating the messages very wierd. Why not sort them on send/receive? And it also doesn't explain why the date of the emails change to the date and time you do the search. It's not the migration date that is shown when searching, but the date and time of the search. Anyway, I've found out that the official Outlook app from Microsoft works fine. No problems with dates when searching using that app. – Harald Aug 26 '17 at 09:03
  • Why Microsoft used this approach I couldn't really tell you. I would do it also as you said. However Microsoft might have reasons for that (oh and press if that solved your answer accept that as answer or at least do an upvote for my work done here ;-) ) – BastianW Aug 26 '17 at 12:58
  • I'm back at this problem again, and it's not as simple as this unfortunately. The emails does not simply have the date when the mails where exported/imported. They all have their normal, correct dates when you just browse the emails. And when you make a search, all emails get the current time as the date. It happens to all new emails as well as old ones. – Harald Nov 05 '18 at 09:34