OL97: Error Message Occurs When You Send an Encrypted Message to a Recipient on the Global Address List (283206)

SYMPTOMS

In Outlook 97, when you send an encrypted message to a recipient that is located in the Global Address List, you may receive the following error message:

Encryption Problems

Microsoft Outlook had problems encrypting this message because the following recipients had missing or invalid certificates or conflicting or unsupported encryption capabilities:

User

Continue will encrypt and send the message but the listed recipients may not be able to read it.

CAUSE

This problem can occur because when Outlook searches the Global Address List for encryption certificates, it searches for three properties in the following order:

Tagged-X509certs
X509-certs
User-certs

If the Tagged-X509certs property is invalid (for example, if it is expired, corrupted, and so on), Outlook does not fail over and query for any valid X509-certs or User-certs properties. For example, if the Tagged-X509certs property is missing and the X509-certs property is invalid, Outlook does not fall back and query the User-certs property, even if the property is valid. This behavior prevents the user from sending encrypted mail to other users who have an invalid digital certificate.

WORKAROUND

Contact your Microsoft Exchange Server administrator to have them remove or republish the invalid or expired certificate from the specified user's mailbox. If the affected recipient is running Microsoft Outlook 2000 SR-1, SR-1a or later, they can use the Publish to Global Address List functionality to update their certificate.

For more information about the Publish to Global Address List functionality in Outlook 2000 and Microsoft Outlook 2002, click Microsoft Outlook Help on the Help menu, type Add a certificate to the Global Address List in the Office Assistant or the Answer Wizard, and then click Search to view the topic.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

This problem was corrected in Microsoft Outlook 2002.