Outlook 2013 randomly loses connection to Exchange 2007 server

Question

Hello everyone,
I have received complaints from some of our users over the past couple of months about them not receiving mails or about sending mails which do not get delivered. A little bit of investigation into the matter showed me that Outlook 2013 had lost its connection
to the Exchange server. (Which is Exchange 2007 SP3 running on Windows Server 2008 / SBS2008, in case it matters.)
Which is bad enough in itself - none of our users running Outlook 2007 and 2010 had that problem - but it also does so in a rather inconspicuous manner, so the users did not notice. Closing and restarting Outlook helped every single time, but the users did
not notice when this happened, and telling them to just restart Outlook every hour or so does not seem like an overloy practical idea.
All of the clients encountering the problem are running Outlook 2013 on Windows 8/8.1 Pro. We do not have any clients running older versions of Outlook on Windows 8, so I cannot tell for sure if this problem originates in the OS or if it is an Outlook problem.
The first couple of times I encountered the problem, it was on laptops, so I suspected some power management issue initially. I made sure Outlook connected to the server via HTTPS, which it already did. Then I did not hear of the problem for about two months,
but recently, two of our users have run into the problem again, and while these were still Windows 8.1 machines, running, of course, Outlook 2013, they are plain desktop computers, not laptops, and I already toned down their power management settings, so I
do not think that it has to do with the problem.
Has anybody encountered a similar problem or even - more importantly - a solution? This problem is really frustrating, because our users are very sensitive to problems with their email, and the fact that this problem only occurs randomly and - all in all
- rather rarely, makes it very hard to track down.
Thank you all very, very much for any insights you might be able to share with me!

Answer 1

Hi,
Please ensure that Outlook 2013 clients retain their connection with the Exchange server using HTTP:
Have the Outlook 2013 user check the settings under FILE -> Account Settings -> Account Settings -> E-mail tab -> Select the account and click Change -> More Settings -> Connection tab -> Exchange Proxy Settings -> Make sure both
"On fast networks, connect using HTTP first, then connect using TCP/IP" and "On slow networks, connect using HTTP first, then connect using TCP/IP" are selected -> OK.
Regards,
Melon Chen
TechNet Community Support
It's recommended to download and install
Configuration Analyzer Tool (OffCAT), which is developed by Microsoft Support teams. Once the tool is installed, you can run it at any time to scan for hundreds of known issues in Office
programs.