Outlook 2007 Sync Issue

[wedwards]

I have read a lot of issues on here with syncing and Outlook - I think I have tried most if not all suggestions to resolve the following issue.

I have a small business of 6 - 8 machines using ZCO. I am running zimbra 5.0.11_GA_2695 network edition together with the equivalent outlook connector. Operating system is RHEL 5.2.

Users seem to access shared calendars and sync fine for about 2 weeks, but syncing of emails and calendar appointments seems to stop at some point. The end user only becomes aware of the issue after they shutdown their computer of an evening and when they come into work the next day and open outlook, all of their missing mail comes flooding in. This also results in double-ups for calendar bookings because the appointment they make doesn't seem to get to the server (I assume).

If a send/receive is manually initiated in Outlook, it completes successfully, however the mail still does not appear in the user's inbox. The only way to get the mail delivered to the users outlook client is to shutdown the machine and restart. If I login to the web client, I can see all of the email in the user's inbox, so the mail is being received at the server level.

This only happens to a few of the users at any one time. Sometimes it is one user, on other occasions its another user.

I have tried rebuilding the outlook profile and zdb's etc but this doesnt seem to work long term.

One consistent error (or maybe not an error) I have seen in the logs on the client is attached in a screenshot. Is this the cause of the problem?

My users are coming up to the first renewal of their zimbra licence and I am not sure how to convince them to pay if I cant fix this problem permanently (or at least for the medium term).

Only thing I havent done is replaced the network switch that all of these users connect to as I thought that maybe there were a few dodgy ports on it that were interfering with syncing (their other network apps continue functioning so I doubt this is the problem but I am out of ideas) - is it worth trying this anyway?

What do I need to do/provide to get to the bottom of this?

[fsiegel]

I think the attached screenshot doesn't have anything to do with your issue. Just offhand, it sounds to me like Outlook isn't shutting down correctly. We have had issues with that in the past, still do occasionally, but there have been a lot of improvements in that area in subsequent releases (we are up to 5.0.15 now, with 5.0.16 coming out in the near future). Also, with Outlook 2007, there have been shutdown improvements made with later service packs.

If you exit Outlook, and then on next entry, if it seems to come up very fast, it's possible it didn't really shut down. Although it's a little ugly, if you think you're having problems, after you exit Outlook, you can wait a minute or so, go into the task manager, and see if the process is still running. This would at least tell you if this could have something to do with your problem. You could shut the Outlook process down at that point.

You also should think about upgrading ...

[wedwards]

I am happy to upgrade to 5.0.15 however I thought that the outlook sync issue was fixed in the release that I am running (according to bugzilla at least)?

I am not worried about the outlook shutdown issue - the users open outlook in the morning and only close it when they shutdown their machines at night. I am more concerned that syncing stops until a machine reboot occurs.

Client logging has been turned on for the affected machines for a while now, and the problem occurred again on Monday this week. On this occasion the user received email at 9.28am and then received nothing in Outlook for the rest of the day. On the following day, upon starting Outlook, the emails from the previous day were delivered to her Outlook inbox. A check of the mailbox on the server indicates the emails were received over the course of the previous day (they just hadnt been delivered to Outlook).

If upgrading to 5.0.15 is the recommended course of initial action, I can do this sometime in the next week, however do you want to see some logs for the day in question? Is there anything in the logs I could look for that would indicate a problem?

[fsiegel]

Yes -- I would like to see the logs for the day in question. There are all kinds of things to look for. I'll take a look first and see if I can find anything. If I do, I'll tell you what I found, and what to look for, so if it happens in the future, you'd have an idea. A lot of times an appointment going from Outlook to Zimbra can mess things up, and that gets tricky. Sometimes, the sync thread dies for some reason. Or it could be something completely different, sometimes obvious, sometimes harder to determine. So post the logs, and I'll take a look.

[ewilen]

Would it be worth looking into the Outlook service pack level? As suggested at http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?tit...ulative_update

[fsiegel]

Sure it would, but you still may have something else going on. Should still look at some logs.

[wedwards]

These are the logs for the day in question - as well as the following day when all the mail received on the previous day came through to Outlook.

Have been having some issues with uploading files, so hope this gets through.

I stuffed up the naming of the files, they are as follows;

06092009.tar.gz - this is the log files from 6th April 2009. The last email received by the user on this day was at 9.28am.

07092009.tgz - this is the log files from 7th April 2009. The user logged in on this morning and all mail received the day before came into Outlook.

[wedwards]

Anyone had a chance to take a look at the logs and see if there are any errors note? If there is nothing, please confirm and I can try the suggested Outlook patches as well as an upgrade to the server in the next week or so.

Please let me know, thanks.

[fsiegel]

Sorry for not getting back to you earlier. I did look at the logs a week ago, and didn't see anything, so I figured I would look at them again and try and find something. I just looked at them again, and really didn't see anything. Sync thread looks ok -- there were no failures or exceptions that I saw, and I did see things getting downloaded, at least in the delegate stores.

Question: a lot of delegate stores were being synced as well. Was she having problems with all the mounted stores, or just the primary store?

I would recommend upgrades of both the client and server however.

[simonwest]

I've bought into a hosted Zimbra solution from simply mail solutions and have been suffering from this same issue over three different PCs for the last six months.

It feels like the Zimbra Connector for Outlook is somehow hanging, thus preventing Outlook from syncing with the Zimbra server. Interesting I also pick up email from three POP3 servers using this Outlook account and mail continues to come in from them fine even when Zimbra backs up.

As someone has said above, killing the Outlook.exe task then restarting outlook does solve the problem short term as does restarting the PC.

Anyone else any ideas how to fix this?