How to troubleshoot the Outlook Offline Address Book in a Microsoft 365 environment

Introduction

This article describes how to troubleshoot the following Offline Address Book issues in Microsoft Outlook in a Microsoft 365 environment:

• Users can't download the Offline Address Book.

• Synchronization errors occur in the Offline Address Book.

• You receive nondelivery report (NDR) messages when you use the Offline Address Book to send email messages to users.

• You receive the following error message when you run the Send/Receive command in Outlook in Cached Exchange Mode:

  Task 'Microsoft Exchange Server' reported error (0x8004010F): 'The operation failed. An object could not be found.'

Procedure

To troubleshoot these issues, follow the steps below. After you follow each step, test to see whether the Offline Address Book issue has been resolved. If the issue is resolved, it's unnecessary to continue to the next step. If the issue isn't resolved, proceed to the next step.

Step 1: Make sure that the global address list (GAL) is up to date

Check whether the GAL is up to date. To do this, ensure that you can view any changes in the GAL by using Outlook on the web. If the expected changes aren't present in the GAL, the changes will not replicate to the Offline Address Book.

If the GAL is correct but the Offline Address Book is still incorrect, go to the next step.

Step 2: Manually download the Offline Address Book and then make sure that Cached Exchange Mode is enabled

Manually download the Offline Address Book in Outlook. To do this, on the Send/Receive tab, click Send/Receive Groups, click Download Address Book, and then click OK. This may also resolve nondelivery report issues if you're using an outdated version of the Offline Address Book. For more information about how to manually download the latest copy of the Offline Address Book, click here:

You can't find a user in the offline address book in Microsoft 365

Next, ensure Outlook is set up to use Cached Exchange Mode. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click File, click Account Settings, and then click Account Settings.
2. Select the Microsoft Exchange account that you want, and then click Change.
3. Under Offline Settings, make sure that the Use Cached Exchange Mode check box is selected.

Step 3: Check that the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) is running

Outlook uses BITS to download the Offline Address Book from the URL provided by the Autodiscover service. To determine whether BITS is running, follow these steps:

1. Press the Windows logo key + R, type services.msc, and then press Enter.

2. In the list of services, click Background Intelligent Transfer Service, and then make sure that the status of this service is Running.

3. If BITS isn't running, double-click Background Intelligent Transfer Service, set Startup type to Automatic (Delayed Start), click Apply, and then click Start. For more information, click here:

   HTTP version of the Outlook Offline Address Book (OAB) does not download

Step 4: Install the latest updates for Office

Ensure that the latest updates for Microsoft 365 or Office are installed. To do this, in Outlook, click File, click Office Account, click Update Options, and then click Update Now. For more information, click here:

How to update Microsoft 365 or Office for Windows

Step 5: Re-create the Outlook profile

If the existing Outlook profile is corrupted, this corruption could be the cause of the issue. Corruption may have occurred if Outlook stopped responding. For more information about how to create and to set up an email profile in Outlook, refer to the following article:

Create a profile in classic Outlook for Windows

Step 6: Determine whether the Autodiscover service is working, and check access to the Offline Address Book

Check whether Outlook and the computer can access the Offline Address Book file on the server. This action is typically done by Outlook in the background. It also happens when you force a download of the Offline Address Book in Outlook. To do this check, sign in to the Microsoft 365 portal, and then follow these steps:

1. Start Outlook.
2. Hold down the CTRL key, right-click the Outlook icon in the notification area on the right side of the taskbar, and then click Test E-mail AutoConfiguration.
3. Click to clear the Use Guessmart check box, and then click to clear the Secure Guessmart Authentication check box.
4. Click to select the Use AutoDiscover check box.
5. Type the email address and password, and then click Test.
6. On the Results tab, note the path of OAB URL.
7. Click the XML tab, locate the <OABUrl> and </OABUrl> tags, and then copy the path that's displayed between the tags. Paste the path into the address bar of your web browser, add /OAB.xml to the end of the path, and then press Enter.

The following is an example of what the URL may resemble:

https://autodiscover.contoso.com/OAB/93179f28-4b4d-4e58-aec1-07bb493be4f4/OAB.xml

The figure below depicts an example of the information that should be displayed in the browser.

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