Windows Phone 8 – Outlook sync error code: 80070057

My boss got a brand new Nokia Lumia 920 with Windows Phone 8 and was very happy about it – as I am also with mine. He got a problem though with synchronizing his Outlook account from Office 365 to this phone though. It worked on his HTC with Windows Phone 7.5 and also from an iPhone!

The error showed on the WP8 device was:

“We’re having a problem synching your information. Try again later. Last tried 2 seconds ago. Error code: 80070057”

After checking the device setup, deleting/adding the account and Microsoft Live ID and much more we found this Microsoft Knowledge base article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2792112

It clearly was the same error – but we could not find a folder with this problem… After renaming quite a lot folders, we contacted the Office 365 support which helped us pinpoint the folder with the issue. This Microsoft knowledgebase article explains the steps you need to take to make and retrieve a log of the communication from the Windows Phone to the Exchange Server: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2461792

It simply say that you log on the the Outlook Web Access, go into “Options”, “Show all Options” and to the “Phone” pane. Turn on logging for the Windows Phone device, try a sync.and click “Retrieve log” from the same page. Afterwards you will get an e-mail with the communication.

If you see a special char or CRLF (Carrige Return Line Feed – which means a new line) in the XML that lists the mailbox folders, then you need to rename this in Outlook Web Access to something else.

In my case the XML showed a line feed, as the </DisplayName> was pushed to a new line after the folder name “Kladder” as the example below shows:

      <Add>     
            <ServerId>23</ServerId>      
            <ParentId>0</ParentId>       
            <DisplayName>Journal</DisplayName>    
            <Type>11</Type>   
        </Add>
        <Add>
            <ServerId>24</ServerId>
            <ParentId>0</ParentId>
            <DisplayName>Junk E-Mail</DisplayName>
            <Type>12</Type>
        </Add>
        <Add>
            <ServerId>25</ServerId>
            <ParentId>0</ParentId>
            <DisplayName>Kladder
</DisplayName>
           <Type>12</Type>
        </Add>
        <Add>
            <ServerId>26</ServerId>
            <ParentId>0</ParentId>
            <DisplayName>Notes</DisplayName>
            <Type>10</Type>
        </Add>

Renaming this to “K” and back to “Kladder” did the trick and the Nokia Lumia 920 could synchronize the mailbox immediately.