Exchange 2010 OWA – Remove Cached Email Recipients/Auto Complete Entries

If you have any Active Directory users that have been deleted out but the addresses still show up in OWA or if you changed somebody’s user/email attributes and emails bounce back as undeliverable, this article is for you. I found this info here, the entries are stored in the user’s mailbox so the you can only delete them by doing one of the following:

  1. Delete an entry from the list using OWA
    1. Login to mailbox via OWA
    2. Create a new meeting request (Has to be a meeting request only!)
    3. Begin typing the entry you want to delete until you see it in the Auto Complete list
    4. To remove one entry from the list, highlight the name in the Auto Complete list, arrow up and arrow down allow you to highlight the name you want to remove
    5. When the entry is highlighted, press the Delete button on your keyboard
  2. Delete the entire list using OWA Light
    1. Log in to mailbox using Outlook Web Access Light (Option doesn’t exist in full version)
    2. Go to Options -> Messaging
    3. Under Email Name Resolution, click “Clear Most Recent Recipients List”
  3. Delete the cache entries from the mailbox with MFCMAPI. Download this tool here. If you have more than a handful of mailboxes that you need to clear, it would appear that this is the only real option, otherwise logging into each user’s mailbox will be time consuming.
    1. Launch MFCMAPI on a PC where it has user’s mail profile that is not configured for Exchange Cached Mode from Outlook.
    2. “Session” menu->choose “Logon and Display Store Table”->choose mail profile in jumped window
    3. On the top-pane, double-click user’s mailbox and go to next window
    4. In the next window->right-click “Root Container”-> select “Open Associated Content Table”
    5. Scroll until you see the “Message Class” column. Right-click on the IPM.Configuration.Owa.AutocompleteCache entry and select “Delete Message”.
    6. In the “Delete Item” window select “Permanent delete passing DELETE_HARD_DELETE (unrecoverable)” from the deletion style drop down box, and click OK. This will permanently delete this message.Notes: It won’t prevent e-mail addresses from caching again in the future

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