I recently had the experience of migrating a client to Office 365. While most things went smooth, one user who was using Outlook 2007 wasn’t able to open one of the shared mailboxes. Every time she tried to open the file, the following error message would appear:
[callout] Cannot expand the folder. The set of folders cannot be opened. Microsoft exchange is not available. Either there are network problems or the exchange computer is down for maintenance.[/callout]
I tried removing her profile and rebuilding it again, but to no avail. I was able to open the inbox using Outlooks option of File > Open & Export > Other Users Folder. I was also able to open the mailbox it in OWA.
In the end, the problem was related to the AutoMapping function of Exchange and Outlook. To solve the problem I had to do the following things:
1. Connect to O365 using your usual Powershell Connection lines:
$LiveCred = Get-Credential $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection Import-PSSession $Session
2. Remove FullAccess permissions for the affected user from the shared mailbox
Remove-MailboxPermission (SharedMailbox) -User (UserAccount) -AccessRights FullAccess
3. Add Full Access permissions back on, but make sure you set AutoMapping to FALSE!
Add-MailboxPermission (SharedMailbox) -User (UserAccount) -AccessRights FullAccess -AutoMapping $false
4. Use Outlook to add another user’s mailbox by editing the account and adding the user by choosing (in Outlook 2013) File > Account Settings > Change > More Settings > Advanced > Add. The dialogue should look like below. Simply add the user’s in the Add dialogue and you should be good to go!
I have exactly the same problem with Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010/2013.
Thanks for your solution !
Glad it helped and that someone reads my articles. 🙂
I have a some what similar issue. We have a client running server 2012 with exchange 2013. All users in that location are using office 2010. They have another location in Iowa and that user can connect to exchange and access email fine through office 2013 however he gets that message when trying to open public folders which is where their team calendar resides. They connect through a VPN tunnel with a Cisco RV042 on both ends. I have tried opening ports on the firewalls, creating a new profile and nothing works. I am baffled!
I also have a similar situation but NO EXCHANGE. It is a windows 8.1 laptop with MS Outlook 2007 and imap account, a little over 8gb. I know it is not the mail server since my phone is still sending / receiving but I cannot access anything in my outlook local account as it has the ominous error.
i am also having same problem, pls give solutation.
Hi Joseph I am facing problem somewhat like this i have created web application in Visual studio 2012 i cannot expand folders web application when i deployed in Sharepoint 2013 its working fine in Server side but in Client Side cannot expand folders can you please suggest me how to solve this issue.I am using IE 11 i am facing problem in Chrome also please help me Thanks
Worked for me too. I was using the Console to do this and it looks like it automagically automounts the mailbox when you grant the permissions. It worked for a while, then just suddenly stopped working. Thx.
Worked for me too, thanks!
Happy to help! Ironically, I used this article to re-solve this problem at the same client just the other day.
Thanks Joseph,
This remove and readd was a fix for delegated permissions and Outlook users on an 2007 to 2010 Exchange migration. Those in 2010 using Outlook 2007(and maybe other clients?)had the problem but after we did this process they could expand folders. I would note that SharedMailboxUser = the target account and User2 is the person that needs the permission to it.
That’s a great clarification. I’ll update the code to be a bit more clear on those descriptions. Thanks!
I’m facing the similar issue but the difference is I m on exchange server 2003, can you suggest how can I resolve this issue ???
Sandy,
I’m not quite sure what to look for there other than making sure that the permissions on the mailbox are correct. In on premise Exchange environments, that’s usually what I’ve seen. Maybe review those settings?
should this work for adding full access permission to an AD group, rather than individual users?
You know, that’s a really dang good question and it sounds plausible, but I have no idea. Anyone else able to weigh in here?
Thanks!!! This solved my problem!!!
We often give supervisors full access to termed employees mailboxes. Most of the time its’s successful, but I’ve had a couple that get the cannot expand folder error even after giving them full access and adding the email account to their Outlook. Any tips for resolving this? TIA
What version of office are they running, Outlook specifically?
Thanks so much Joseph, this worked after a lot of failed attempts, it had initially worked for me but I deleted thinking I had done something wrong, when I tried again kept getting that error. Followed your steps and it worked! 🙂
Eli, no you aren’t crazy. They just suck at making clear error messages. Glad to have helped!
Good Day,
Your solution worked nicely, but I can’t help feel like having to use Powershell to correct a permissions issue is a bit of a step backwards from the way things used to be.
You have to wonder who the guy at Microsoft was who put in the, “Let’s use DOS commands instead of the Windows GUI we developed” memo.
Anyway, enough ranting. Thanks for your fix.
The use of a scripting language on the back end is incredibly powerful and a wise move on their part for sure, but omitting a GUI equal does indeed seem like a departure from what has made Microsoft so mighty in the first place. And so it goes when they don’t listen to their customers… Happy to help.
I read your solution for the outlook problem but I can not understand what to do ”My error said Cannot expand the folder. The set of folders cannot be opned file access is denied you do not have permission required to access ….,pst
My folders were accessible then I closed outlook to run a back up and when I opened outlook again I got the above error .
I went in an changed permissions from ready only. but I did not solve the problem
I get the same issue
can you help
I’m having the same issue. Just migrated a few months ago. Using Exchange 2007 on premise and Outlook 2013. Just one user seeing that message for a shared mailbox. I tried your suggestion and still the same. Very weird!
This can resolve the problem, but the question is how to get the auto-map fixed? I really like that feature in Exchange 2010 and don’t understand why it’s broken on the server I’ve recently inherited.
Unfortunately, I have no idea. It seems like a simple thing, but nothing I’ve tried actually fixes the root of the problem.
I have issue with outlook, while giving the delegates access user 1 to user2, After giving all permission, In user 2 outlook user 1 name Appeares, But i try to expand the folder it says ” can’t expand the folder”. Pls help on the same.
Thank you 🙂
I have the same on Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010, one of the user has that problem all the sudden. I try to recreate the mail profile and ost, but no help. Your solution work for me, you have save my day.
Do I need to load a particular module to get the Remove-MailboxPermission cmdlet to work? As of right now I’m getting an error that it doesn’t recognize the cmdlet. Specifically, my error reads:
“The term ‘Remove-MailboxPermission’ is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program.”
I’m using a domain administrator account, and running the PowerShell ISE (PowerShell v. 3.0, btw) as administrator. Any idea why this isn’t working?
It sounds like you don’t have the O365/Exchange powershell commandlets loaded. I can’t remember what you need to install, but it essentially gives you access to those commands.
Thanks. We have on premise Exchange 2013 and this worked for us, too. Odd variations.
Shared mailbox created via ECP along with full access permissions for several users. My full access permissions were inherited.
I connect the mailbox to Outlook 2010, restart it, and get the error when trying to expand the mailbox.
I run the first command on my account and get the warning that it did not remove my permissions because they are inherited. I run the add command with the -AutoMapping $false parameter. It completes successfully. I don’t run any more commands.
We check this out on a colleague’s Outlook who I had also added to Full Access via ECP (not inherited) His works fine.
Either, I fixed his with the command I ran on mine (unlikely), or the incorrect AutoMapping parameter is only inserted for accounts added during the mailbox creation (my inherited permissions) and not for accounts added with the subsequent “Properties” edit.
Strange, but I am not questioning this now that it works. Thanks again.
I am having the same issue but only in sporadic cases. Some users can access some mailboxes and others cannot. Removing and re-adding the permission with automapping:$false does not resolve the issue for them. Some mailboxes we are trying to access are recipient mailboxes as well. If the same user is on office 2010 its fine but only certain mailboxes will work on 2013. Any ideas?
With 2010 and 2013 there are some issues with compatibility. First of all…your 2010 Servers need to be updated. Specifically https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2545850. Also, your outlook version if very important. Specifically you need at minimum January 2015 CU for outlook 2010 and 2013. You will find documentation on the changes in these CU’s, but there are changes regarding interoperability. You also did not specify if you are using kerberos. As for the automapping issues in this article, we are working with MS to address the errors.
I can add an additional mailbox using Joseph’s job-aid from above and see all the folders for the second mailbox. But, all my “rules” for the second mailbox are NOT an option.
If I add an additional mailbox from:
file/Info/Add Account/Add New Account
I get the “Cannot Expand the folder”.
The second mailbox is a Proxy mailbox and have full permissions.
The second mailbox works great in OWA!
Thanks,
Same issue here. We have a shared mailbox created in the portal. Permissions are set; some people can expand it, others cannot. All can open it in OWA. Tried the commands and it did not resolve the issues.
Tagging so I can check back later to see if a full resolution has emerged.
Thank you
Thank You …worked for me too !!!
Same issue here. We have a shared mailbox created in the portal. Permissions are set; some people can expand it, others cannot. All can open it in OWA. Tried the commands and it did not resolve the issues.
Tagging so I can check back later to see if a full resolution has emerged.
Hi All, Same issue for me. Just found this post and tried it out. Exchange 2013 and Outlook 2013 are what’s running. No Office365 in the picture.
Ran the commands, manually added the mailbox from inside Outlook’s account settings, still get the “set of folders cannot be loaded” error.
Hoping someone can help enlighten us!
Same issue here. Tagging to see if anyone finds a solution. I have tried everything including clearing the OST, clearing the TEMP and cache, clearing Credential Manager, Remove permissions and Re-Add without AutoMap but nothing has been able to resolve the issue. Oddly enough, that same user is able to open two other mailboxes from Outlook 2013.
I found out what was causing this issue for my mailbox in question.
After an Exchange database dismount due to corruption, we repaired the database to 99% (waiting on Microsoft to fix the 1%) and remounted it.
Turns out the mailbox that was giving the error is slightly corrupted still and Exchange has “quarantined” it. Google “Exchange quarantined mailbox” for a lot more detail, but to see if your mailbox might be quarantined, sent it an email. A bounceback will be generated saying mailbox is quarantined if indeed it is.
Hope this helps someone.
Tagging to see if anyone finds a solution.
we are also facing this problem with O365 connected by Outlook 2013.
Same issue, but very different solution. Tried the solution at the top of this page – didn’t work. One extra bit of information regarding our scenario is the end user would receive a certificate error if they had permissions to a shared mailbox. If we removed the permissions, the certificate error went away and the user could login and use their regular mailbox with no issues. Regardless if we waited for automapping (which never worked) or manually added the shared mailbox, result was the same – could not open folders. When we manually added a shared mailbox to the Outlook client (2010 or 2013), we would get incessant login prompts, and no matter what credentials we typed in, nothing worked. So…finally…. we did a Wireshark packet trace and found the client was looking for and finding an ‘A’ record for ‘mail.ourcompanydomain.com’ and it was resolving to our ON-PREM server – an SBS2008 box. Didn’t make sense though, because our internal domain was ‘ourcompanydomain.local’. So – why was our Outlook client looking for an A record? Don’t know – but when our client received the internal server ip, it couldn’t find what it needed and just stopped trying.
RESOLUTION: I found two additional DNS zones hosted on our server. One for mail.ourcompanydomain.com, and one for ourcompanydomain.com. These were leftover from a time when some prefixes (such as mail.) were hosted inside our domain, and the rest were hosted outside our domain. I removed BOTH zones (no longer needed) and restarted the Outlook client. ALL clients now get automapped shared mailboxes AND can access all folders within the shared boxes! Hope this helps someone in the world battle this half-baked product called Office 365!
I know this is an old thread, but I ran into this today and wanted to share my resolution.
We have a DAG with about Six Servers. UseCustomReferralServerList was set to $False.
All clients connect via Outlook Anywhere.
One of the Dag members in another site had the Microsoft Exchange RPC Client Access “Silently” fail, and stop processing requests. This seems to have effectively broke PublicFolder Server Referrals from anyone who managed to land on that server.
The only evidence I found of the problem was when I went to restart services on that MB, and that service failed to stop or start. As soon as I restarted the server, client connectivity was restored for the handful of users who seemed to be being sent to this impacted server.
I determined they were being sent to this server by looking at the Outlook Exchange Connectivity tool on the clients desktops.
We have since switched to using a CustomReferralList as we do not want those requests crossing sites to that Datacenter.
This has nothing to do with Office 365, but a multi-tenant Exchange 2010 Environment that we host.
In case you’re one of people having this problem with outlook and exchange (NOT O365)
it’s a conflict between builds of Outlook and Exchange.
See Microsoft link below for resolution.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3004852
we have been have the same issue with clients after doing updates recently. we were getting initially the services on the exchange server was automatically stopping resolved that but then ran into the clients getting certificate errors. couldn’t do a manual install on local machines. Its a self signed certificate. I got the certificate issue resolved and then ran into this error and this did not help any other suggestions I’ve been fighting with this issue for a week now and I know I have spent too much time on it. thanks
Is there any difference in the script if you are using Exchange Server 2010 and Outlook 2013? When we try to expand the Public Folders, sometimes it works, sometimes it will show nothing (and the expansion arrow disappears). Closing and reopening Outlook takes care of the issue, but we have .NET apps in C# created in Visual Studio that generate public calendars appointments that error out when they are not accessible. Might this fix that issue as well? Other suggestions are welcomed as this started happening about the time we upgraded to Office 2013 from Office 2010.
Thanks, worked a dream for me too with Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010.
I had the same problem with Exchange 2010 / Outlook 2013. Removing the FullAccess permission and re-adding with “-Automapping $false” fixed the issue.
good post…unfortunately this didn’t fix the issue I’m experiencing with Office 365…shared mailboxes were working nicely but I deleted a user and tried to create another one and for this particular user, even though the mailboxes are automapped I cannot expand them nor cannot open them from any version of outlook manually. I can only browser via OWA. have case open with Microsoft. Will post the fix….Tried on multiple machines and get same result(no domain etc.)
Microsoft had to fix something on the backend. Since I deleted a user and then didn’t wait long enough to create another user with the same email address, permissions weren’t cleared properly on the shared mailbox properly.
worked for me, thx a mill!
This post is a life saver!
Hi. My problem is similar but a little different. I have access to 5 mailboxes, all of which I can see on my laptop. I can expand and collapse all of the folders for all 5 of the email accounts. However, when I go into Outlook on my desktop computer, I can see all of the mailboxes and although I can expand and collapse the folders for 4 of the email accounts, the 5th one just shows me the title but won’t expand. I know there’s stuff in there because I can see it in that mailbox on my laptop. Why won’t it expand for me on my desktop? Thanks in advance for any help 🙂
Did you ever figure this out? Sounds like EXACTLY what is going on here. Outlook opens the first 4 mailboxes and then the other 8 don’t open with the error “cannot expand the folder. The set of folders cannot be opened. Network problems are preventing connection to Microsoft Exchange.
Hi
I think the solution is the versions of Exchange and Outlook as per KB3004852. The adding without auto mapping is annoying as every time a user create new profiles on different machines etc or a new user is created this has to be done manually, while patching the versions has resolved the issue.
It would be interesting to know if anyone has the correct versions and still ahs the problem.
hope this helps
Well, here we had the same Problem but the cause was a missing CNAME record like “autodiscover.ourcompany.com = autodiscover.outlook.com”. It was supposed to be there so no one thought about it. But thanks to Microsoft’s Office 365 Support- & Recovery Assistant (you can download this great tool at https://diagnostics.office.com/) we found the culprit. Soon after setting up the missing record shared mailboxes worked like a charm in Outlook 2010.
Awesome. Thanks for sharing that with the group. I’m sure that will help someone else along the way.
Awesome, was struggling to get the resolution and this worked as a charm! Thank you so very much.
Joseph, you my friend are a deadset bloody legend! You solved my problem.
Thankyou!!!
This resolved the issue for me, Exchange 2013 and Outlook 2013 with a non-domain workstation. Many Thanks!
Hello, We’ve had same issue and found solution for it, which was pretty simple in our case. Mainly we had to remove some certificates from User accounts and to do it need to go to Control panel->User Accounts where press on manage certificates for Windows. We removed some of them which we knew they made problems but if you are not sure about them I guess you can delete all of them. Than our external mail boxes started working with no issues. Hopefully will be helpful for you.
Well I fail at stage 1….what on earth is a Powershell Connection?
This can be caused when you have :
1. corrupt .ost file. (new profile will resolve this)
2. If adding multiple shared mailboxes, you are going over the objtFolder limit for the version of your exchange. This is put into place to prevent any one mailbox / user consuming all the resouces available to the exchange server. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3115602/performance-and-synchronization-problems-when-you-work-with-folders-in
3. If you have excessive amount of items in either the “inbox”,”sent items”,”deleted items” or contacts. What is classed as “excessive” depends on exchange version, outlook version and resources available to the exchange server. however I have seen issues manifest themselves from anything between 3000+ items in one of these “special” folders.
see https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc535025(v=exchg.80).aspx
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/2768656/outlook-performance-issues-when-there-are-too-many-items-or-folders-in
I just wanted to thank you about that great tip.
that helps me a lot.
Thanks again.
Yohan
I just having the same issue and it got resolved by following the above action plan.
Thanks you so much.
Great Post. Had same issue and it got resolved after modifying the registry and running the PowerShell cmdlet. I had to remove the Full Access granted using O365 Admin Console. Much appreciated.