Introduction

When attempting to manage mail-enabled public folders many points of friction or frustration can occur.   Most of these points of pain come from the fact that the mail-enabled aspect of a public folder is a separated object from the folder in the hierarchy and the Active Directory proxy object does not store the folder path of the related folder in the hierarchy. The relationship between the proxy object and the folder in the hierarchy can be broken and happens whenever the directory ‘ObjectGuid’ does not match the value stored on the PR_PF_PROXY value of the hierarchy folder.   This break in the relationship can occur for many reasons:

• The proxy object was somehow deleted and recreated which causes the object to receive a new ObjectGuid, and which now doesn’t match the hierarchy folder’s value.
• The hierarchy folder loses the linking value thru some odd user interaction or by a replication failure.
• The public folder in the hierarchy is moved to a new replica or public-folder-mailbox.   When a public folder is moved to a different ‘store’ (database or mailbox) its underlying EntryID value will change slightly as a result which can break the mail delivery since the AD proxy object had previously stored the value.
• The public folder in hierarchy can be deleted and fail to delete the AD proxy object. This leaves behind an orphaned object in Active Directory and in the Global Address List.

When attempting to manage mail-enabled public folders many points of friction or frustration can occur.

Much of the management issue with public folder links comes from the carrying forward of older mail-enabled public folders from prior versions of Microsoft Exchange.   This is very prevalent if an organization’s mail system has existed since Exchange 2000 or 2003. In these older versions of Exchange EVERY new folder created was automatically mail-enabled but was hidden from the GAL.   When upgrading Exchange over the years many of these may simply have “come along for the ride”.   They will appear as mail-enabled folders from a management perspective, but in reality do not actually deliver mail because the mapi EntryID link format is incompatible with later versions of Exchange. We have published a detailed document, The Secret Challenges of Mail-Enabled Public Folders in Microsoft Exchange, on this subject as well as provide some recommendations as to how to detect and solve this issue. To learn more, Click Here