Outlook Cannot remove multiple email "ghost" accounts

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A most bizarre problem. A client has a newer machine with office build 1908 11929.206.06 under Proplan plus. He is running Windows 10 Pro 1909.

He is the Office 365 administrator for his company. He is running Desktop Outlook on his laptop. On his Outlook he shows his account and four others all people in the company. Let’s call them Foo1, Foo2, Foo3 and Foo4. It is as if he has added them to outlook as other accounts he is monitoring on his main Outlook machine. So far, that’s a normal thing to see.

But, he claims he never added them. And more importantly, when I log onto his machine, and right click on the accounts to remove them, I get an error message which tells me that he can’t remove the user, and needs to go to the File accounts menu and remove them from there. Odd thing, they aren’t listed in the email accounts.

When we log into Office online, the ghost accounts are not showing in Outlook 365 online. Only in Outlook on the Desktop.

I have dug through the Groups accounts and other Office 365 Admin account settings. Nothing is abnormal.

Has anyone seen this before? Or do I need to call MSFT?

Thanks in advance.

 

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One possibility seems to be described in this article, with a nine-step AD solution:

When a user has Full Access permission to another user’s mailbox, Outlook 2007 and above may automatically open the mailbox in the profile. This is called “automapping”.

These mailboxes are not listed as secondary mailboxes in Account Settings and can only be removed by removing full access permissions or by using a cmdlet to remove automapping.
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Server Migration

Following a server migration, an administrator had users’ mailboxes showing up in his profile. This was the result of giving himself Full Access permission to the mailboxes during the migration.

The administrator removed Full Access permission for the mailboxes but this didn’t remove the accounts from his profile.
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You need to edit the user accounts in the Active Directory and remove your name from the MsExchDelegateListLink attribute. (followed by the nine steps required)

Removing shared mailboxes from an Outlook profile [Slipstick Systems]

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Thanks. I was the original poster. I’ll give that a try. It’s the best idea I’ve had presented yet. I have been in their AD trying to find just this kind of thing, but did not think to look there. I’ll try that.

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b

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This was useful. I just tried it, but it seems like the commands are setup for an admin on a server version of AD/Exchange and did not work as hoped on Office 365. However, I did go into the user account in Exchange (cloud admin) and found that the foo1 person who has this happening on his account did show up in each user account as full access permission. Once I removed him from their accounts he still had their names showing in his Outlook (desktop) version but their email no longer showed up. There was still no way to actually remove their names from his outlook, and i’m wondering if there are registry entries that I would have to delete regarding this on the desktop client. We did try reinstalling Outlook but it did not change the situation at all. Thoughts?

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