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I have tried moving a primary email address from one mailbox to a new one. Lets call the old adress: Department@company.com

I renamed this account, and SMTP addresses to Department.old@company.com and moved the old "Department@company.com" address to a new mailbox.

The new mailbox has the name of department.special@company.com and now "department@company.com" as an alias.

When sending e-mail from external sources, the e-mails appear in the new mailbox. When sending from within our organization from any @company.com address it seems to hit the "department.old@company.com" even if I type "department@company.com" in the "to:" field.

Could anyone explain why; and how to fix this? When running the Get-MessageTrackingLog and filtering for my own address as sender, I can see my test-mails but the "Recipients" field shows as "department.old@company.com" this is even if I'm 100% sure I typed "department@company.com".

The change is less than 24 hours old. Could it be some internal address-lists that needs updating? The domain-user for the old account is named Department.old; in the same manner as the primary SMTP address.

xstnc
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1 Answers1

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There are lots of reasons for this.

The first reason will be as you have guessed, the address book is out of date on the clients.

Outlook in cached mode uses the OAB. This is only updated once every 24 hours by default on the server (which you can force) and is then downloaded by Outlook automatically once every 24 hours or when Outlook is restarted, which you cannot change. You can force a download, but there is no central way to do that. Therefore if the change is very recent it will not be live everywhere.

The second reason is simply that the SMTP address is not used internally, other than for resolution to the mailbox. Therefore users sending to the address will keep going to the old mailbox. If they are using the drop down list instead of selecting from the GAL, then there isn't much you can do about it, other than telling users to select the address fresh.

As for a fix, that is hard to say, as you haven't outlined what the actual goal of the change was (there will be more to it than just moving the address to a new mailbox on whim). One resolution might be to forward the old mailbox to the new one, but that raises questions about why the old mailbox wasn't simply renamed.

Simon.

Sembee
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  • I tried forcing update of the address books, and after the change ticked 24 hours+ things started to work as intended. Some clients were slower than others, but that could be due to what you explained. Thanks for a detailed summary of all the points! – xstnc Jan 28 '16 at 14:12
  • If you think about it, it can take up to 48 hours for things to happen. If the OAB is only generated once a day (by default) then the client only updates once a day, if the timing was wrong, it could be a while before the change is seen. After making a significant change what I do is regenerate the OAB: get-offlineaddressbook | update-offlineaddressbook. 30 minutes later it should be available to clients to download. – Sembee Jan 28 '16 at 14:41