I have a customer that routinely deletes sub-folders in their Outlook mailboxes.
These subfolders get re-recreated programmatically later.
They’re using Outlook 2003, and up until a few days ago, were on Exchange 2003.
We just upgraded to Exchange 2010 on the back end.

After the upgrade, the customer is having trouble deleting sub-folders. We press the delete key on the keyboard, or right-click and choose to delete, and nothing happens.
There is no error message in the Application Log to give us a clue about what is happening.

I have seen this kind of problem before, but it only happened when deleting “system folders”, for example when we somehow got a duplicate Calendar folder, or when we want to delete the “Sync Issues” folder.
In those cases, the solution was to open Outlook Web Access and delete the folder from there. So I tried it with this scenario.

Surprisingly, Outlook Web Access delivered a useful error message! Basically, it told me that it could not delete the folder because there was already a folder with that name in the Deleted Items folder.
I went and looked, and found not only a folder with that same name, but also a bunch of others with incrementally numbered names, like Folder, Folder1, Folder2, Folder3, etc.

My conclusion:
With Exchange 2003, if you delete a folder, and there is already a folder with that name in the Deleted Items folder, Exchange simply adds a number to the folder name as it drops the folder into Deleted Items.
With Exchange 2010, it fails to delete the folder and, with the Outlook 2003 client at least, fails to notify you about why it cannot delete the folder.

So it seems that Exchange 2010 is slightly retarded in this aspect. WTF, Microsoft?!

Additional: I have tested this scenario with Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007. It adds a number to the end of the folder, no problem. Unfortunately, I do not have a test platform with Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010 available. However, I will have such a test platform in the near future. I will test this when that becomes available, and update the article with the results.

Tags: Exchange, Outlook, Outlook Web Access

Problem: You want to have separate URLs pointing to two different domain names, with SSL, and both pointing to the same Exchange server.

Environment: Exchange 2007 on Server 2008 with IIS7.

Usage Scenario: Your e-mail domain has two (or more) e-mail domains, and users in both domains want to use their own domain names to access OWA. For example, users with domain1.com e-mail addresses want to go to https://remote.domain1.com/owa, and users with domain2.com e-mail addresses want to go to https://remote.domain2.com/owa to access their e-mail.

In Exchange 2003/IIS6, you might have done some crazy metabase manipulations, such as exporting the entire website to a file, then reading it, and choosing to import the /exchange  subfolder only.

Well, it’s actually somewhat simpler than that with Exchange 2007/IIS7.
Here’s what to do:
1. Open Exchange Management Shell with elevated permissions.
2. Paste this command into the shell:

New-OWAVirtualDirectory -OwaVersion:Exchange2007 -ExternalUrl:https://remote.domain2.com -InternalUrl:https://remote.domain2.com -Name “owa” -WebSiteName “Domain2.com”
Change the parameters in this command to match your environment, of course.

This command makes some assumptions:
a. Your external and internal URLs to access the website are the same. You could use different ones at this point. It’s up to you.
b. Domain1.com already has OWA enabled. So, we’re adding the OWA virtual directory to Domain2.com.

If you’re experimenting with this, and you make a mistake, DO NOT delete the virtual directory from the website using IIS Admin. Instead, use this command in Exchange Management Shell:
Remove-OwaVirtualDirectory -Identity “owa (Domain2.com)”

This will not only remove the virtual directory, but also fix some behind-the-scenes stuff that would have bitten you if you had deleted the virtual directory (voice of experience here).

Here is a Technet article with the complete command reference for the New-OWAVirtualDirectory command, and some related ones.

Updated - Here is a related command to add the ActiveSync virtual directory as well:

New-ActiveSyncVirtualDirectory -WebSiteName “YourWebSite” -ExternalURL “http://YourAccessURL/Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync“

If this gets out of sync, you can use this command to remove it:

Remove-ActiveSyncVirtualDirectory “Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync (YourWebSiteName)“

Tags: Exchange, IIS7, Outlook Web Access, Virtual Directory