Unable to sync Outlook 2010 with Exchange? Mailboxes too large?

Question

We retain a single document ingestion inbox for incoming files from our clients, the size of which is ~30 GB. Several users are monitoring it via a shared folder in Outlook 2010.

After reformatting my machine, the server has attempted to restore the shared inbox; however, I've noticed that all of the contents are not downloaded to my machine. I've confirmed that I am unable to see several items that others who have access to can see.

Also, I am experiencing an issue with respect to my primary inbox whereby I do not receiving new e-mail without clicking the "Update Folder" button. I'm not sure if the issue is server-related as I a have no issue with new e-mail being pushed to my phone.

This issue seemed to begin when I added another shared inbox relating to a prior employee. Is it possible that this could result from connecting to too many shared inboxes that are large in size?

Outlook seems to perform properly when not operating in "cached mode" and I have tested on multiple machines. I'm completely at a loss here. Has anyone experienced similar issues?

Answer 1

DanBig is right. Outlook caches all data from the mailboxes you are accessing to a local OST file. While this is happening you'll only have a partial data set until it has finished updating the cache. This can take quite a while.

If you feel like the update has stalled for some reason or there is some kind of glitch preventing a full update, you can delete the local OST on the client machine, then allow Outlook to perform a refresh. The file location is usually "C:\Users\YourUser\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook", where "YourUser" is the user account you login with.

Until then all you can do is wait for the sync to complete, which could be quite a long time if the mailbox you're trying to access is huge. You can monitor the size of the local data file and see if it matches up with the other Outlook clients that are working by right clicking the profiles, choosing properties, then clicking the "Folder Size..." button.