Exchange 2007: Unable to change/delete OWA Signature when being generated with broken html code

 

One of my customers were complaining that one of their users was unable to change, edit or disable the email signature in OWA. All the Exchange infrastructure is installed on Win2k8 SP2/Exchange 2k7 SP2 Servers, no matter if they were using IE6, IE7, IE8 and even FFox, they were unable to change the signature settings for that particular user in OWA, as long as they change any signature settings and save the configuration it reverts to the previous settings.

Looking into the error code we had the following:

Client Information
——————
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.3; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)
CPU Class: x86
Platform: Win32
System Language: pt
User Language: pt
CookieEnabled: true
Mime Types:

Exception Details
—————–
Date: Wed Sep 8 11:15:39 UTC+0100 2010
Message: ‘body’ is null or not an object
Url: https://webmail.domain.com/owa/user@domain.local/8.2.247.2/scripts/premium/foptmsg.js
Line: 7

Call Stack
———-
initSgCtrl()
onWL()
tryWLd()
chkScrpts()
window.onload()

Dump Event
———-
recordset = null
type = error
fromElement = null
toElement = null
altLeft = false
keyCode = 0
repeat = false
reason = 0
data =
behaviorCookie = 0
source = null
contentOverflow = false
behaviorPart = 0
url =
dataTransfer = null
ctrlKey = false
shiftLeft = false
dataFld =
returnValue = undefined
qualifier =
wheelDelta = 0
bookmarks = null
button = 0
srcFilter = null
nextPage =
cancelBubble = false
x = 0
y = 0
srcElement = null
screenX = 1360
screenY = 168
srcUrn =
origin =
boundElements = [object]
clientX = 1360
clientY = 60
propertyName =
shiftKey = false
ctrlLeft = false
offsetX = 0
offsetY = 0
altKey = false
errorMessage = ‘body’ is null or not an object
errorUrl = https://webmail.domain.com/owa/user@domain.local/8.2.247.2/scripts/premium/foptmsg.js
errorLine = 7
errorCharacter = 139
errorCode = 0

After some research I found that the customer created an email signature with Rich Format that broke the html code, it is something that we can come across when we build our email signature at MS Word/OpenOffice and we simply copy it from there and paste it into OWA Signature options.

To resolve this issue, delete the ‘IPM.Configuration.OWA.UserOptions’ object.

To do this, follow these steps:

1) Create an Outlook profile in ‘online mode’ (to avoid the complete download of the user mailbox…) for the mailbox that is experiencing the issue;
 
2) Download MFCMAPI from the the following website:  http://mfcmapi.codeplex.com/
    Depending on your Outlook installation version, choose between x86 or x64 bits version.
 
3) Open MFCMAPI;
 
4) Click Session, click Logon and Display Store Table, then select the profile;
 
5) Double-click the Mailbox – Display Name for the user’s mailbox;
 
6) Right-click Root Container, then click ‘Open Associated Contents Table’;
 
7) Locate the object that has a Message Class ID of ‘IPM.Configuration.OWA.UserOptions’;
 
8) Delete the object to remove the corrupted signature;

Note:
The User email signature will be deleted and it has to be rebuilt with the correct html code;

Note 2:
Don’t mess around with MFCMAPI or you can seriously damage the user Mailbox structure.

R-Tape Loading error,
Luís Rato

~ por Luis Rato em 2 de Janeiro de 2011.