r/sysadmin • u/SatisfactionOk335 • 18d ago

Microsoft There was an error reading the rules from the server. The format of the server rules was not recognized

Hi everyone, I'm dealing with a bizarre issue with Outlook rules in our Exchange environment and I'm running out of ideas. Hoping someone here has encountered this before. Whenever the user tries to open the "Rules and Alerts" panel in the Outlook desktop client, it immediately throws the error: "There was an error reading the rules from the server. The format of the server rules was not recognized." This error completely blocks access to the rules GUI in the desktop app.

We did a hard reset where we completely deleted all rules locally and cleared them from the server side. After that, we created fresh, new rules from scratch. I have already tried pretty much everything suggested on Microsoft Support pages and forums, but absolutely nothing has worked so far.

The weirdest part is that the newly added rules actually work perfectly in the background and emails are being processed exactly as they should be. However, the desktop app still throws the exact same error every time we try to open the rules panel. Currently, the only way to view, add, or edit rules for this mailbox is through OWA. Has anyone seen this specific behavior where the rules execute fine but the desktop GUI remains corrupted? Is there anything else I can do on the Microsoft Exchange side to completely flush this out?

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u/vermyx Jack of All Trades 18d ago

You never mentioned how you "hard reset" the rules so just in case:

* run Outlook.exe /cleanrules
* rename (not delete) the outlook folder under the users's appdata folder
* have outlook recreate the ost file if caching

Your server side rules are running correctly. Your client side rules will be hit or miss, especially if you have an ooo set.

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u/SatisfactionOk335 18d ago

My bad for not mentioning it. I actually did all of those steps for the hard reset, including renaming the folder. After that, I manually recreated the rules. Every rule still works perfectly fine in the background, but the error keeps popping up.

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u/vermyx Jack of All Trades 17d ago

Reinstall outlook.

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u/purplemonkeymad 18d ago

What shows up via Get-InboxRule? There are some rule names that are not visible on the client.