Troubleshooting 0x8004010f in Outlook

If you are reading this post, I assume that you are experiencing error 0x8004010f in Outlook when syncing the address book to Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010. This is a result of the client computer not being able to contact the web service providing the offline address book.

The most common reason this occurs is that autodiscover is not configured properly. If autodiscover is not configured properly then the URL for the offline address book is never passed on to non-domain joined clients. This error is not typically an issue for domain joined computers because they locate an SCP object for autodiscover in Active Directory and the query the autodiscover service for the correct configuration information.


Non-domain joined computers locate the autodiscover service based on a DNS name or SRV record. The two URLs used for locating autodiscover are:

• https://myemaildomain/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml
• https://autodiscover.myemaildomain/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml

Using either one of these options requires you to an SSL certificate on your server that supports multiple host names. These certificates tend to be quite expensive. So, if you're cheap like me, the other alternative is to create an SRV record that points to the autodiscover service instead.  You can use this to point at the DNS name already in your certificate. The following is a screen shot of the SRV record I've created in our DNS hosting at GoDaddy (click it to see the whole thing).

A client recently had another issue with this error being received on a single domain joined Windows XP computer. Because the error was affecting only a single computer, it was quite puzzling. It turned out to be proxy settings that were pushed out as registry changes. The proxy was not visible in the IE Internet Options. However, you could view it by using the Proxycfg.exe tool. This tool is depreciated in Windows 7 and it is now recommended to use netsh instead (http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/r0b/archive/2010/01/08/proxycfg-on-vista-and-win2008.aspx).