[Aristazi]

Wondering if anyone can shed any light on a problem I've had reported to me numerous times from employees in my office.

Just every now and then I'll get a call that someone can't login to their email in Outlook even though they are sure they are using the right password. The solution is simple, the answer 9/10 times is that the username in Outlook has randomly changed from "[email protected]" to "[email protected]" (I think that's how it comes out, I know it uses our company name instead and I've seen it add the domain name in there as well). Once the user changes it back to what it is supposed to be, they can login. At first I ignored it, but it just keeps happening. I've contacted our parent company but they've said it's got to be a problem on my end.

Our parent company manages our email exchange server (Exchange Server 2010) and I manage our Active Directory domain here. On the user computers the account is setup to Connect to Microsoft Exchange using HTTP.

It seems that the problem only started happening after I setup our company as a domain (it was a workgroup previously). So somewhere and only occasionally it seems that Outlook gets confused about what email account it is trying to connect to (even though there is only one).

I've checked the Windows user credentials on some of the user's computers that are having this issue and there is none.
I've checked the settings in Active Directory because some users had old exchange server settings left over from when we managed our own exchange, but that doesn't appear to be the problem either because newer users that have never hooked into out internal exchange server also have this message appear.

I'm looking at possibly installing the Outlook/Office Group Policy settings, but I haven't found yet if it will have a policy option that will be of any use to me. When I google the issue I get lots of different issues, but I haven't found any good resolution yet.

Any ideas? (I'm not afraid to say I'm still new to system administration, I'm learning on the job and have only been at it for about a year now)

Thanks!

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i'm assuming the email domain, and your active directory domain are completely separate (i.e. your computer domain is something like "localcompanyname.local" and the email is "corporatecompanyname.com")?

is your local domain a child of the parent domain or are they not connected at all?

exchange likes to integrate with active directory domains pretty heavily. in 2010 you can do "mutlitenant" setups though where the exchange environment services multiple email domains that aren't specifically tied to an active directory domain.

[dsenette]

i'm assuming the email domain, and your active directory domain are completely separate (i.e. your computer domain is something like "localcompanyname.local" and the email is "corporatecompanyname.com")?

is your local domain a child of the parent domain or are they not connected at all?

exchange likes to integrate with active directory domains pretty heavily. in 2010 you can do "mutlitenant" setups though where the exchange environment services multiple email domains that aren't specifically tied to an active directory domain.

[Aristazi]

dsenette, wow I guess I missed your reply a long time ago.

Yes, it's as you said, the email domain, and our company domains are different. It probably doesn't help that our email usernames are for example: [email protected] but our actual email addresses are [email protected].

Since I went through and removed all the old Exchange accounts the problem seems to have almost completely stopped appearing. I don't know why. And even just this week it appears that one of our new employees, who again never had a local Exchange account, ran into this problem. Either my users are learning what to do about it, or it's just completely random.

And yes that's right, our Active Directory tree is in no way connected to that of our parent company that supplies email.

jomerchant, thanks, but this is in no way a pst file issue. It's definitely something at the high-end Active Directory/Exchange configuration. The users don't have any problem accessing their emails, they just need to have the correct user name ([email protected]) selected when they login.

Thanks!