Error 0x8004010f while downloading the Offline Address Book (OAB)

Background: Exchange 2010 was migrated to new servers. Initially, one server held every role; after migration there were two: (1) Mailbox and (2) Transport and Client Access. Everything worked well for two months. After creating a mailbox for a new employee, users could not see it in the Address Book.

Deleting the client profile, as suggested elsewhere, did not help and could not help. During the migration, the OAB was overlooked. Exchange settings still showed a Default Offline Address Book, but the corresponding IIS resource was missing.

How it was identified on a client:

  1. Downloading the address book returned error 0x8004010f: “Operation failed. Object cannot be found.”
  2. The folder C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\Offline Address Books contained 8667bdc0-f5a5-4531-a6fa-688a7133272d with *.oab files. Their modification date was the last successful download date. In this case, it stopped at the time of the server migration two months earlier.

The client was trying to download an address book that no longer existed.

What we did: removed the existing Default Offline Address Book, created a new one, and assigned it to users. It was assigned directly in mailbox database settings, although other approaches may be possible.

Four hours later, users received the current OAB without restarting the Client Access server.

The C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\Offline Address Books folder then contained a new 0f772359-2ff2-4a9d-9ac0-ea2df76c42fd directory with six .OAB files. The old 8667bdc0-f5a5-4531-a6fa-688a7133272d directory was removed and was not recreated.