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You experience issues when your Exhange account uses Cached Exchange Mode and you set a .pst file as the default delivery location in Outlook

Article ID: 2701020 - View products that this article applies to.

SUMMARY

Outlook lets you set a personal folders (.pst) file (also known as an Outlook data file) as the default delivery location when your Microsoft Exchange Server mailbox account is also configured in your Microsoft Outlook profile. If the Exchange account is configured to use Cached Exchange Mode, you may experience unexpected behavior. This article describes some of the known issues that may occur when you use this configuration.

MORE INFORMATION

When your Outlook profile is configured to deliver email messages to a .pst file, and when the Outlook profile also includes an Exchange account that is configured to use Cached Exchange Mode, you may experience one or more of the following issues:

You receive duplicate copies of incoming email messages.
You cannot accept meeting invitations. When you open a meeting request, you see the following warning in the information bar:
This meeting is not in calendar; it may have been moved or deleted.

When you try to respond to the meeting invitation or cancellation by clicking Accept, Tentative, or Cancel, you receive the following error message:
Cannot open the calendar folder for user_name. Your profile is not configured to support this operation for this user.
Note In this message, the placeholder user_name represesents your account name.

Because of these limitations, we do not recommend the configuration that is described in the "Summary" section. To prevent unexpected issues from occurring, we recommend that an Exchange account always be set as the delivery location. By default, if the Exchange account is configured to use Cached Exchange Mode, the delivery location is the offline folder (.ost) file (also know as the offline Outlook data file).

Additionally, we recommend that you enable Cached Exchange Mode for the primary Exchange account in your Outlook profile and that you set Outlook to deliver email messages to the .ost file. There are many advantages to delivering email messages to the .ost file. These include, but are not limited to, the following:

You can work offline and synchronize changes when you reconnect to your Exchange server.
You can choose folders to synchronize and to keep current.
You can centrally store email messages on the Exchange server to let multiple clients and Outlook Web Access or Outlook Web App (OWA) access the mail.
In some circumstances, email messages that are delivered to a local .pst file may not be retained on the Exchange server. This may be a factor if email messages must be retained for legal or disaster-recovery purposes.