Analyzing Exchange 2010 SP2 RU4

Another six weeks has gone by and it’s time for another set of Exchange roll-ups. The splendidly-named Customer Experience Team released RU8 for Exchange 2007 SP3 and RU4 for Exchange 2010 SP2 on August 14. The big story around Exchange 2010 SP2 RU4 is the expansion of retention policies to cover Calendar and Task items. You can find out more about this topic from my post on WindowsITPro.com.

Apart from the new functionality, RU4 contains a set of bug fixes that range from the interesting to the ho-hum. Here’s my take on the 22 fixes included in RU4 as listed in KB2706690. Some weird problems that cause different components (Edge Transport, Information Store, and RPC Client Access) to fail are addressed, plus the infamous WebReady problem caused by a faulty Oracle software library is fixed.

The majority of the problems that have been fixed seem to be edge conditions that most deployments are unlikely to meet. Other problems in hosting or multi-domain environments are also fixed. As with all roll-up updates, it’s wise to review all of the fixed problems with a view of identifying issues that are important for you or could explain some “funnies” that you’ve been experiencing. Be sure to test RU4 carefully before deployment, especially because of the change in retention policy processing.

KB number	Microsoft KB title	My notes
2536846	Email messages sent to a mail-enabled public folder may be queued in a delivery queue on the Hub Transport server.	Problem occurs when a mailbox server hosting either the PF hierarchy or the first copy of the target PF is unavailable. The result is that messages are queued until that server becomes available again. Fixed now!
2632409	Sent item is copied to the Sent Items folder of the wrong mailbox when a user is granted the Send As permission.	The sending mailbox has both Full Access and Send As permissions for another mailbox (pretty common in scenarios such as manager-assistant) and the message ends up in the sender’s mailbox rather than the “send as” mailbox.
2637915	“550 5.7.1” NDR when an email is sent between tenant organizations in a multi-tenant Exchange 2010 environment.	Exchange 2010 contains code to detect possible message loops that is invoked under certain circumstances when hosting multiple organizations. As it turns out, the code is a little picky, so it’s been told to behave itself and let the message get through.
2677727	MRM cannot process retention policies on a cloud-based archive mailbox if the primary mailbox is in an on-premises Exchange 2010 organization.	A Watson dump occurs when MRM running on an Office 365 server attempts to process an archive mailbox located. The issue being that Office 365 didn’t have access to some essential folder information maintained in the primary mailbox in an on-premises server.
2685001	Retention policies do not work for Calendar and Tasks folder.	Quite. That’s the reason why RU4 has closed the gap and now allows the Calendar and Tasks folders to be processed (with care).
2686540	Journal report is not delivered to a journaling mailbox	Problem occurs when the transport system attempts to process a journal report for a read-only message delivered to a user mailbox and finds that it can’t cope with a property of the TNEF attachment in the journal report.
2689025	Performance issues using the light version of Outlook Web	Apart from indicating issues such as taking > 5 seconds to open a message, no great detail about the problem is provided. I assume that some coding problems were found to explain the problem.
2698571	Some messages are not delivered when the MessageRateLimit parameter is set in a throttling policy.	MessageRateLimit establishes the number of messages that a mailbox can submit to the transport system per minute and is set in a throttling policy that is then applied to a user mailbox. The problem appears when Outlook is configured in cached Exchange mode and a number of messages are created offline. When Outlook connects, the messages are uploaded to the server and the message rate limit is encountered. Messages that exceed the rate limit are copied to the Sent Items folder but are not delivered and the user doesn’t receive an NDR. Not good.
2698899	Add-ADPermission fails when DomainController parameter is used	Problem only occurs in a multi-domain environment and it’s all to do with making sure that Exchange has the right AD information necessary to make changes to a user account.
2700172	Recipient’s email address is resolved incorrectly by OWA	The problem occurs when email addresses contain hyphens. OWA uses hyphens as word-breakers and gets confused and selects the wrong address when it resolves email recipients.
2701162	User who is granted Full Access to another user’s mailbox can’t see Free/Busy information	The user can see some information, but no detail of meetings/appointments, etc. Basically all due because Exchange doesn’t resolve permissions correctly.
2701624	ItemSubject field is empty when Search-MailboxAuditLog is used to return information from mailbox audit log	Problem occurs when the cmdlet attempts to fetch details of mailbox audit log records from the wrong place.
2702963	“Open Message in Conflict” button not available in a conflict notification message	Conflicts occur in public folders when multiple users attempt concurrent edits of the same item. When this happens, Exchange is supposed to display a form to the users and PF owners to allow them to resolve the conflict. It doesn’t happen, but does now.
2707242	The Information Store service stops responding	Problem occurs when many (!!!) users attempt to access a public folder at the same time causing a deadlock to happen. Not good.
2709014	Edge Transport process crashes intermittently	Looks as if the internal code encounters some problems when it attempts to process certain messages.
2709935	Edge Transport process repeatedly crashes	Seems similar to 2709014, except that the Edge Transport process keeps on crashing.
2713339	Multi-mailbox search returns incorrect results for complex searches	AQS is the query language used for multi-mailbox searches. In this instance, it seems that the AQS syntax is parsed incorrectly when complex (multiple clauses) searches are constructed.
2713371	Throttling policy throttles all EWS applications	Exchange Web Services (EWS) is used for applications such as Outlook for Mac. This problem reports that a EWS thread that consumes more resources than permitted by the throttling policy will have the effect of stopping processing for all other threads for all EWS applications belonging to the same user. As the KB says, this happens “unexpectedly”.
2719894	RPC Client Access service consumes 100% CPU and stops responding.	The RPC Client Access service handles incoming MAPI client connections (Outlook) and the problem is due to incorrect management of the worker threads used to handle these connections.
2723383	Incorrect time zone shown when the Resource Booking Attendant declines a meeting request from a user in a different time zone.	Could be confusing when users receive a notification that their meeting request was declined for a time that’s different to the one that they requested.
2724188	A subject containing colons is truncated in a mixed Exchange 2003/2010 organization.	Problem occurs when multiple colons are in message subjects and items are then moved or copied by Outlook from an Exchange 2003 mailbox to an Exchange 2010 mailbox. Exchange does some “renormalization” of the MAPI subject property and truncates the data.
2726897	Event 14035 or 1006 logged when Admin sessions are exceeded.	An Exchange mailbox server can support up to 10,000 Admin sessions, which should be more than enough to handle normal administrative activity. In this case, delegate activity absorbs an abnormal number of Admin sessions, which then causes errors when attempts are made to initiate subsequent admin sessions.

Also worth noting is that Microsoft has included a fix to prevent the need to disable and re-enable Forefront Protection for Exchange (FPE) when applying a roll-up update (KB2743871). The change is very welcome. It’s just surprising that it took so long for Microsoft to remove this irritation.

Update August 17: See my WindowsITPro post on “WSUS, the WebReady fix, and Exchange 2010 SP2 RU4”

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