Outlook error-'Can't open e-mail folders.You must connect to Exchange w/ current profile before you can sync folders w/ your Outlook data file'

Note that the error message I put in the title of this question is abbreviated. The actual error message is below.

I have an Exchange account and using Outlook 2010 as the client. I run in Cached Exchange Mode and have an .OST file locally.

Recently I uninstalled and reinstalled office. I set up a new mail profile when prompted by Outlook 2010 upon first execution of the program. In my initial attempt, I pointed the data file at my existing OST file. In my second attempt, I had Outlook create a fresh empty file.

In both cases I'm getting the error 'Cannot open your default e-mail folders. You must connect to Microsoft Exchange with the current profile before you can synchronize your folders with your Outlook data file (.ost).', also shown in this screenshot --> http://drop.io/4rc9v9o/asset/outlook-error-png.

I don't know how to connect with the current profile - that's what I thought I did when I created a new .OST file?

I've had this problem for several days so my OST file is now out of date. Once I get things running I obviously want my active mailbox to update the OST, not the other way around.


Turns out it was an Exchange-side problem. Support told me that for some reason, MAPI was disabled on my account.


I was getting the same exact message after we disabled and re-enabled services on a user mailbox, which also include their mailbox quotas.

To get the user back online, we had to push an active directory site to site replication. After this was done, the user was good to go.


We found a weird solution to this issue. We have the user open up OWA from their local machine on our LAN, and then open up outlook. Not sure what the correlation was but when we run into this issue, opening both up always seems to fix it. It must be something that gets messed up on Exchange but it seems to clear once the user opens OWA and then opens up Outlook. We are currently on Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2007