I am running a single Exchange 2003 Server on a Windows 2000 box. All of our clients are using Windows XP Pro with either Office/Outlook 2002 or 2003. The problem I am having is: When I add a new user/mailbox,the user account creates immediately, and as always, it takes a couple of minutes for the e-mail address to show up in AD, but it does show up. When opening the user account properties and clicking on the E-Mail Addresses tab, both the SMTP and the X400 address have been created. The user can log on without problems. If I go to ADUC on the Domain Controller, the account is populated there as well, including the e-mail address, etc.; the same for my local admin PC where I have the AdminPak snap-in installed. Initially the new mailbox does not show up in Exchange System Manager>Administrative Groups>Servers>my_exchangeservername>First Storage Group>Mailbox Store>Mailboxes, along with all the other mailboxes. I assumed this was likely due to there not being any mail sent to the new mailbox, however when I go to another PC and try to send the new user an e-mail, I get the message Microsoft Office Outlook does not recognize username, (Which is the new users login name), and when I sign on as the user and open Outlook to go through the set up to allow the profile to be built for them to use Outlook, at the end of the process when Outlook is opening the mail box, I am prompted for a username and password before Outlook completes the set up, like Outlook is trying to authenticate and the account is not recognized. Sporadically, I can sign onto and send/receive mail to the new mailbox using OWA, but that comes and goes. Once I was able to do this, the mailbox showed up in System Manager Mailbox Store, but it shows the last login was by NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM. I am still unable to set up Outlook for the new user profile or send mail to the new mailbox using Outlook regardless of what OWA is doing at the moment. Up until a few days ago we had no problems adding new users with mail enabled accounts or distribution groups. The mailbox was created normally and the users were able to send and receive mail without any problems. Since before this issue started, there have been no know changes to the Exchange Server other than applying the latest patches from Microsoft. All older existing mail accounts work fine; both internally and using OWA, its just with the newly created ones that this happens. I tried applying Exchange SP2 and re-booting. I manually updated and rebuilt both the enterprise and the domain recipient update services policies, which are set to always run and the problem persists. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

I was able to get OWA working, mail going in and out of new mailboxes. It just appears now that Outlook cannot log onto the exchange server. I'm stumped!

Hi BWDenen, I understand that currently, you can login the new created mailbox through OWA and send/receive emails from it. Nevertheless, you cannot log on the new mailbox through Outlook. If I have misunderstood your situation, please let me know. BWDenen, please let me know: 1. Whether the Username and Password are required again and again when attempting to login the new mailbox through Outlook 2. Whether you can configure the POP3 account on the Outlook to login your exchange server successfully. NoteYou need to enable Pop3 service firstly on the Exchange Server. 3. If the Pop3 account can login the Exchange Server with no problem, please configure MAPI profile and change different authentication methods to troubleshoot the issue. Mike

Hi Mike. Thanks for your reply, and sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I was out of the office for a coupleof days. Yes you have the correct understanding of the situation. I have no problem logging into the AD account, but whenattempting to log into Outlook, the username and password login in dialog box comes up. And when trying to send mail to the account from any other PC logged in with an active account such as my own using Outlook, it cannot find the user or mailbox. I'm not sure how to check the POP3 stuff, I will have to do some looking aroung to see how to do that. But I have something really screwy going on. I tried to delete 2 of the new accounts to kind of "start from scratch", but they won't delete.

Hi BWDenen, I suggest that we firstly troubleshoot why the message Microsoft Office Outlook does not recognize username is received when attempting to send email to the new user through the user alias. BWDenen, please understand that when you click the Check Names button or send email by using alias, Outlook attempts to resolve the alias to an email address firstly by using the current GC used by the Outlook through MAPI connection. The Outlook searches for any mail-enabled objects that belong to at least one address list and that also match the alias. Hence, please follow the steps below to troubleshoot the issue 1. Whether the new added user can be located in the Address Book of Outlook (uncheck Cached Mode). 2. If the new added user cannot be located from the Outlook Address Book, please also check the Address Lists preview by using ESM 3. If the new added user cannot be found from both Outlook and Exchange Address Lists, please let me know whether the DC which you added the new user account has been listed in the Working DC list and Working GC list (If it is also a GC) of Exchange Server. If it is not, I suggest that you manually specify the DC as Working DC and then check whether the new added user account has been listed in the Address Lists of ESM and Outlook. 4. If both DC and GC are configured correctly and the new created user can be located on the GC which used by Exchange and Outlook, please run ADSIedit tool to check whether the showInAddressBook attribute of the user on GC are correctly configured. The attribute should be set by Recipient Update Service. For your reference: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/253828/en-us Regarding delete the new user issue, please let me know whether any error is encountered when attempting to delete them and whether any event logs are recorded. Mike

No, the new user cannot be located in the Outlook address book, nor in ESM preview. I did a rebuild of the Online Address Book and nothing changed. I have 2 DC, both set up as GC. The designated DC for the RUS is showing up OK and I tested DNS, it is OK. All the SRV records are where they should be. I ran ASDI edit and checked the showInAddressBook on several users, some that are showing in the address list and some that are not, the attribute values are the same for all. Also, msExchHideFromAddressList attributes area all set to 0 as well. No error when trying to delete, they appear to delete, but the next day they showed back up in ADUC. Subsequent attempts have been successful to delete accounts though. Additional actions are, I set diagnostic logging for MSExchangeAL > LDAP Operations and Address List Synchronization and MSExchangeSA > Proxy Generation to maximum. I created a couple of new mail enabled users and then went through the Application logs. Everything appeared to be generating OK. All the 8011 events had corresponding 8012 events and the 2 RUS policies were found. I opened a case with Microsoft and they cant fix it either. I've burned way too much time on this already. I am about ready topto move my Exchange 2007 migration up a few months to get this problem resolved Thanks.

It is fixed. It turned out to be a combination of several small issues that eventually caused the failure I was experiencing. We found that there was an invalid Exchange object in the AD on the Exchanges server, then we discovered there were some SRV records missing in DNS that pointed to the second domain controller, (which is one of 2 GCs in my domain), and caused some replication issues. Once everything was cleaned up and replication was forced and succeeded, all was well. Thanks for your help.