Microsoft Withdraws Exchange 2010 SP1 UR4

Microsoft announced today on the Exchange Team Blog that they have withdrawn Exchange Server 2010 Update Rollup 4 from the Download Center.

This comes two weeks after UR4 was released and customers alerted Microsoft to a bug that surfaced when moving or copying public folder contents and was causing items to be deleted.

We have discovered an issue impacting some customers who have installed Exchange 2010 SP1 RU4 into their Exchange environment and as a result have removed SP1 RU4 from Download Center. We recommend customers do not proceed with any planned deployments of SP1 RU4.

A small number of customers have reported when the Outlook client is used to move or copy a folder that subfolders and content for the moved folder are deleted. After investigation we have determined that the folder and item contents do not appear in the destination folder as expected but may be recovered from the Recoverable Items folder (what was previously known as Dumpster in older versions of Exchange) from the original folder. This behavior occurs due to a customer requested change in SP1 RU4 which allowed deleted Public Folders to be recovered. Outlook and Exchange are not correctly processing the folder move and copy operations causing the folder contents to appear to be deleted. OWA and Exchange Web Services clients are not affected by this change and process the folder move or copy actions correctly.

It isn’t 100% clear but in reading the announcement it appears that UR4 may not be re-released.

We will be providing a fix in Exchange 2010 SP1 RU5, scheduled for release in August, which prevents the content loss in the target location during the move/copy process. In addition, we are also working with the Outlook development team to examine their code for proper behavior and identify if a fix is necessary from the client.

After a stretch of buggy update releases for Exchange Server many customers will also welcome this statement.

We are commencing an internal review of our processes to determine how we can best prevent issues such as this one arising in future.

If you have experienced the data loss scenario Ross Smith IV from Microsoft describes how it occurs and what to do about in this comment:

When using the Outlook client to COPY a folder stored on an Exchange server to a different location (e.g., User Mailbox, PST or Public Folder) a new folder is created, however message items in the folder being copied, including sub-folders, are not created in the destination folder.  If the Outlook client is used to MOVE a folder stored on an Exchange Server Information Store to a store of a different type (e.g., Mailbox Store, Public Folder Store or PST), a new folder is created, however message items in the folder being moved, including sub-folders, are not created in the destination store and the items are deleted in the source location.  Items deleted can be recovered in the source location using the Recover Deleted Items functionality available within the Outlook client.