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I am pretty much ready to decommission Exchange 2003 in the environment. I've got seven 2003 servers. The only hold up at this point is Public Folder replication to 2010. At this point I'm having an issue with one particular public folder of contacts (mail-enabled). I discovered the issue in the event log. I typically receive three errors from MSExchange Store Driver everyday in between 1 and 3pm. They are event IDs 1020

Error 1 from Exchange 2003 Server A:

"The store driver couldn't deliver the public folder replication message "Folder Content Backfill Response ([email protected])" because the following error occurred: Property validation failed. Property = [{00062004-0000-0000-c000-000000000046}:0x8092] Email2AddrType Error = The length of the property is too long. The maximum length is 9 and the length of the value provided is 28..."

Error 2 from Exchange 2003 Server B (and sometimes from a different server). I always receive two of these:

"The store driver couldn't deliver the public folder replication message "Folder Content Backfill Response ([email protected])" because the following error occurred: The duration between startTime and endTime (4.09:00:00) of the recurrence is greater than the minimum duration between two occurrences (1.00:00:00)."

After researching, I found out that it's possible that the reason for the first error is the "Email Address Type (2)" field may have an invalid character in some of the contacts. I ended up discovering what public folder the problematic contacts are from due to a user submitting a ticket about missing contacts.

I enabled ContentConversionTracing and PipelineTracing from this blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2008/01/10/public-folder-replication-troubleshooting-part-4-exchange-server-2007-2010-tips.aspx

With tracing enabled, I found the culprit contacts, but there is no email address or email address type in the 2 fields. This leads me to believe these are corrupt contacts. Since I couldn't necessarily fix the issue I decided to:

  1. Remove the 2003 server with the possible corruption.
  2. Remove the 2010 box from replication on that folder.
  3. Add 2010 back in so that it replicates with a different 2003 box.

The folder is only about one MB in size with a few hundred contacts. After adding it back to 2010 last night, the public folder is still empty as of this morning. What's even of more concern is that when I run a PowerShell script I found online to provide a report on public folder replication, it shows 2010 as being 100% successful replication. In addition, now I have two other public folders of contacts with problems. They show item number and size counts of 0 even though I didn't add or remove replication partners for those folders.

I debated just creating the contacts again on 2010 will probably take less time, but what scares me is that replication is supposedly 100% yet there are issues. How do I know there aren't other folders with issues? Of course that was then and now I have to figure out the problem with the other two public folders that are empty now.

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After much troubleshooting, we ended up working around the problem and got rid of the errors about a week ago with no issues since.

What we ended up doing to find the problems was accessing the public folders with a mailbox in 2003. It seems as if there was corruption in the public folder with contacts since I did not find any contacts with the Email Address 2 Type incorrect (they didn't even have a second email address anyway). I modified a few contacts by adding a second email address, saving it, then removing it. For a couple contacts it fixed the problem for others it didn't. I exported the contacts to a PST, created a new public folder, and copied them to it.

The second error was more tricky. PipelineTracing didn't provide any information regarding the public folder with issues or the data that was corrupt even with logging increased to expert. From the event log error it sounds as if it was an appointment in a calendar with bad start and end times. I checked the size and item counts and compared the public folders in 2003 to 2010. I zeroed in on the folder with a significant difference and opened the calendar with a mailbox in both 2003 and 2010. Changed the view to list view, copied all the appointments, pasted them to Excel, sorted by name, and compared the results between 2003 and 2010. We did not find anything odd with the appointments. They were older appointments that either weren't recurring anymore or were just one time. Deleted the appointments and ran the Update Content command on the PF until we removed all the problematic appointments.

I assume both folders had corruption and even though there was nothing wrong with either the contacts or appointments themselves, it wasn't replicating. Afterward, item counts and sizes were very close and confirmed everything was on 2010 by copying the appointments to Excel again from both mailboxes and there was none missing on the 2010 mailbox.

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