I’ve got a couple of remote users who report not having any new email since sometime in 2005. These guys don’t sign on to the computers all that often, so I suspect Outlook didn’t automagically change their mailbox settings when I moved them to our new Exchange server back in 2005. Typically, I would do a remote assistance session with the users while logged in. However, these guys aren’t in the office very much and when they are I’m never at my desk. So I decided to try a new trick – and hopefully it works.

I logged in to the domain controller in that office and opened the Registry Editor. I then connected to the remote registry of the computers in question and did a search for the old Exchange server under HKEY_USERS. Remember to create a backup of the registry key before changing any values!!!!I’ve replaced every instance of the old server name with the new one for anything under HKEY_USERS<SID>SoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrent VersionWindows Messaging SubSystemProfilesOutlook. The two registry entries that seem to pop up are REG_SZ 001e660c which contains the server name, and REG_SZ 001e6614 which contains the distinguished name of the server (ex: /o=domain/ou=First Administrative Group/cn=Recipients/cn=username). I think I changed close to 20 different instances of this pair of registry settings manually (no scripting this time).

Until the guys get back in the office to test my changes, I’m not sure if they actually works. I’ll let you know if they do.

UPDATE: The registry hack worked perfectly for one user. It didn’t work for the other user as he was actually setup to access the original Exchange server which had a different name from the last one. Once I corrected for this, both users worked great using this registry hack.

(Migrated from https://normesysadmin.blogspot.com 6/16/16)