What is MAPI_E_RECONNECTED?

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Remember Jason’s article about the reconnect logic we added to Exchange’s MAPI? The idea was that if your GC went down, Exchange’s MAPI should be able to reconnect to a different GC and proceed smoothly. Mostly smoothly though, since the last call sent to the old GC may fail with MAPI_E_END_OF_SESSION and need to be retried. What was left unsaid from that article was that if you’re using Outlook’s MAPI, which supports reconnect without special configuration, there are some other error codes that can bubble up to the client. Development has given me permissions to document a couple that have shown up in the wild:

 #define MAPI_E_RECONNECTED MAKE_MAPI_E( 0x125 ) // 0x80040125

#define MAPI_E_OFFLINE MAKE_MAPI_E( 0x126 )  // 0x80040126

MAPI_E_RECONNECTED, aka 0x80040125, is returned by the Exchange Address Book and Message Store providers when the RPC connection token is discovered to be out of date. The connection token is basically a number tracking the current connection. If the token on our current transaction is different from the token on the connection, this means we have reconnected, so MAPI_E_RECONNECTED is returned. MAPI_E_RECONNECTED can be treated the same as MAPI_E_END_OF_SESSION and the call should be retried.

MAPI_E_OFFLINE, aka 0x80040126, is returned by the Exchange Address Book and Message Store providers when we discover that we are offline. Typically this means that something has happened in the environment, such as a server going down, or loss of network connectivity. This error is most likely to occur when using a cached mode profile and attempting to bypass the cache to talk to the server. If the cache was never able to establish a connection to the server in the first place, we may be in this offline state where MAPI_E_OFFLINE could surface.

Neither one of these errors will be returned in all scenarios where it would appear they would appear to apply. In most cases, MAPI_E_NETWORK_ERROR or MAPI_E_CALL_FAILED will be returned instead. But now if you do get one of these errors you know what it means. Both of these errors are specific to Outlook’s MAPI only. They will not appear with MAPICDO.

Enjoy!