How to Turn Off Cached Exchange Mode for Microsoft 365 Shared Mailboxes?

Summary: The Cached Exchange Mode allows Outlook users to access mailbox data offline, but you can face challenges such as Outlook performance issues due to large OST files, corruption of OST files, Outlook freezing, and many more when enabling the cache mode for the shared mailbox data in the local system. In this blog, you will learn three manual methods to turn off the cached exchange mode option for shared mailboxes: If you are already experiencing issues due to large OST files and your data has been lost, using a third-party converter tool like Stellar Converter for OST can help you recover and save data in multiple formats.

Cached Exchange Mode is the default mode in Microsoft 365, Outlook.com, Microsoft Exchange, and IMAP Server accounts. This mode enables the users to access their mailbox data, such as emails, contacts, calendars etc., when they are not connected to the Internet. This mode particularly helps when you’re in a place with a patchy Internet connection or facing other connectivity issues.

While this is convenient, this also has some disadvantages. In particular, if you use one or more shared mailboxes and access them with the same Outlook profile, it increases the size of the locally saved OST file. Quickly, the OST file can exceed the recommended size limit of 50 GB. When this happens, you start experiencing issues, like slow Outlook performance issues, delays in sending and receiving emails, Outlook freezing or not responding, new emails not showing, and more. Sometimes, The attempt to log on to Microsoft Exchange has failed, and the OST can also become inconsistent or corrupted.

To avoid these issues, you can turn off the Cached Exchange Mode for the shared mailbox. It helps prevent the OST file from growing beyond the recommended limit. Turning off cached mode can also remove potential sync issues and other Outlook performance-related issues.

However, there is no need to turn off the Cached Exchange Mode for the entire account. Microsoft offers the option to turn off the cached mode for shared mailboxes only.

Ways to Turn Off Cached Exchange Mode for Shared Mailboxes

Here are some ways that you can use to turn off Cached Exchange Mode for shared mailboxes.

1. Turn off Cached Exchange Mode using Outlook

To turn off the Cached Exchange Mode for shared mailboxes in different Outlook versions, follow these steps.

For Outlook 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021

Note: If you like to make some parts of the emails available offline, click the “More Settings” option and specify the period for which data will be saved in the OST file.

For Outlook 2010

2. Turn off Cached Exchange Mode through Registry Editor

You can also turn off the Cached Exchange Mode through the Registry Editor. Here are the steps:

Note: If the Cached Mode key is not available, right-click on Outlook and choose New to create the key.

3. Turn off Cached Exchange Mode using Group Policy

If you’re an administrator, you can disable the Cached Exchange Mode through the Group Policy. However, to use this, you must install the Administrative Template Files (ADMX/ADML) on the Exchange Server. Once you have downloaded the template, follow the below steps to turn off the Cached Exchange Mode:

Now, ask the users to restart Outlook.

This option is highly effective for disabling the caching of shared mailboxes in the most recent Outlook versions, including Outlook 2021.

Conclusion

Turning off the Cached Exchange Mode for shared mailboxes in Microsoft 365 helps prevent OST files from growing large and improves user productivity. In case, your OST file is inaccessible due to its large size, the easiest option is to use a third-party OST to PST converter software like Stellar Converter for OST. This tool can recover data from an inaccessible or orphaned OST file, and save it in PST and other readable file formats, like PST, EML, RTF, MSG, PDF, and HTML. You can even export the data from the OST file directly to Microsoft 365. This way, you will not lose any data due to an oversized OST file.

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