Yet another strange/buggy GAL behavior

[Carello]

Hi,

One of our clients has been having some severe problems the the global address list, I guess I'll have to try to describe the whole thing in order to make it understandable;

The client's users found out that they could edit the GAL directly from their Outlook clients (wlhich I think is extremey bad that they can), but doing so only edited their own local cached copy of the GAL.
When we found out what they had done, we noticed even more strange behaviors - if a user had deleted an entry in their GAL in their Outlook client, that entry was lost forever, the Zimbra Outlook connector does not download a new copy of the GAL.
To be precise, the locally cached copy of the GAL never changes even if changes are made on the server that affects the GAL, like adding new distribution lists or new accounts, and a locally deleted entry is never returned.

The real problem here is, how can we "write protect" the locally cached copy of the GAL so that the users cannot do this again and how can we re-synchronize the GAL so that the local copy is overwritten, without having to re-synchronize the entire mailbox?
Deleting the Outlook profile and synchronizing everything again is not an option, these mailboxes are between 2-3GB in size and the client is only using a low speed DSL connection, it would take weeks to download everything again.

Please, if you've encountered this or a similar problem before, or know how to solve it, we'd really appreciate some help.

We're running Zimbra 5.0.18 Network edition and ZCO from 5.0.2931.15 to 5.0.3064.18.

[fsiegel]

Of course, you can just do a Tools->Send Receive->Global Address List->Update Global Address List in Outlook. This will do a full sync of the GAL, but you wouldn't be downloading anything else, and you wouldn't be creating a new profile. Will look into the thing about being able to delete GAL entries.

[Carello]

Thank you for the reply, but as to date, the suggested solution has not worked, once an entry has been deleted in the cached copy of the address list it has not been synchronized when forcing an address list update - but I will give it another try and see if there's any difference this time.

[Carello]

Hi again,

Unfortunatly, re synchronizing the address list did not work, only about 1/5 of all global addresses was synchronized when doing what you proposed.

Any other suggestions, maybe?