Outlook & Exchange - Rules not working

How to delete rules that are not working from your Exchange 2000 server.

I discovered this fix for a problem that was discovered when people couldn’t set their out of office assistants. The message appeared to be set, but then the message never went out. The way to fix this was to first delete the rules on the mail server and then redo them. This is not a fix for an end user to do themselves.

You can find this utility on your exchange 2000 server, probably under the sp3 directory or on the Exchange server cd called mdbvu32.exe in the utils directory.

When you start mdbvu32 you the first screen you get will be say NULL, just click OK and continue. A window will come up that says MDB Viewer Test Application, from here select select MDB and OpenMessageStore. You might also be asked for a profile just as you would if you were setting up Outlook for the first time with the name of the exchange server and user name – (you will be choosing the profile of the user with the corrupt rules).

Then from the MDB menu open the ROOT FOLDER, under child folder select TOP OF INFORMATION STORE (double click). Then under child folder select INBOX (double click). You will see another window called Associated Messages in Fld, these are your rules. Select the rule or rules you want to delete and then from the pull down list called OPERATIONS AVAILABLE choose
lpFld→DeleteMessages() (On Selected MSGS)and press the CALL FUNCTION button.

Close out of those windows until you get back to the MDB Viewer Test Application window and then choose MDB, Store Logoff and click OK and then it is safe to close the application.

It should be noted that the rules do not have user friendly names, you can see more properties if you double click on them. In some cases you may just want to delete all the rules and start over, which is what I did in almost all cases.