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.