Domain

DC                        -              Server 2003

Exchange             -              Server 2003

Clients                  -              Win7 Pro / Office 2007 (off site)

Scenario

A user who is based 80 miles from IT Support, called us to report that she is not receiving email. I was able to remote her pc, to discover the Disconnected message in the bottom right corner of Outlook. She is working online. I tried to ping our Exchange server from her machine, only to receive a time out.

Info

Our exchange server is fine (no other users reporting problems).

User has no other connectivity issues.

Attempted fixes (some out of blind desperation!)

The trusty reboot!

Un-ticked Download shared folders (Ive seen this cause problems before)

Un-ticked Use cached exchange mode

Removed and re-added users mail profile on client machine

Removed and re-added users user profile (not tried in this instance but have tried before)

None of the attempted fixes resolved the issue. Admittedly, some of my fix attempts may have been born of a lack of knowledge and or blindly trying random things, which is why I need some help. My knowledge may be limited in comparison to many others out there. I cannot try a fix which involves removing the machine from the domain as the machine is 80 miles away, with no local IT support.

After an hour, the machine would ping the exchange server again, so I re-created the users mail profile again and everything was fine, however I am wondering if there is a more effective fix out there. I am curious as to why this happens every now and then, and if there is a more effective and direct fix

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Nathan

• Edited by Gunn80 17 hours 26 minutes ago

That can literally be caused by anything between Outlook and the Exchange Server bits.  Most likely you have some kind of a network problem, such as a firewall issue.

So you could remove and re-add the mail profile, but you couldn't ping the server?  You didn't specify if the ping test was using the hostname or IP address.  The fact that you couldn't ping the server, and then you could, leads me to believe it was a network (or DNS) issue like Ed said.