There’s an awful lot of questions about this issue online with very few answers and it’s, unfortunately, something I came across earlier today when we realised that suddenly our support desk in CRM had stopped receiving any emails.

In this article, I’ll go through some things to check that fixed the issue for me and will hopefully help anybody else experiencing this.

Troubleshooting

In order to properly test this, I enabled Dynamics Tracing using the excellent Diagnostics Tool for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 which I’ve covered in a previous article and then sent an email in to make it generate whatever error it saw fit.

I then checked the CRM Async Service log on the server which was generating 3 separate errors which pointed to the issue, I’ve copied the most important part below –

Crm Exception: Message: At least one system user or queue in the organization must be a recipient, ErrorCode: -2147218683, InnerException: Microsoft.Crm.CrmException: At least one system user or queue in the organization must be a recipient
 at Microsoft.Crm.Common.ObjectModel.EmailService.FindBestOwner(AddressManager addressManager, TrackingInfo trackingInfo, AddressEntry[][] allResolvedAddressEntries, String traceSubject, Int32& ownerObjectTypeCode, ExecutionContext context)
 at Microsoft.Crm.Common.ObjectModel.EmailService.Deliver(Boolean userPromote, Guid emailId, String messageId, String subject, String from, String to, String cc, String bcc, DateTime receivedOn, String submittedBy, String importance, String body, BusinessEntityCollection attachments, Guid campaignResponseId, Entity emailDeltaEntity, ExecutionContext context, Boolean validateBeforeDeliver)
 at Microsoft.Crm.Common.ObjectModel.EmailService.DeliverIncoming(String messageId, String subject, String from, String to, String cc, String bcc, DateTime receivedOn, String submittedBy, String importance, String body, BusinessEntityCollection attachments, Entity extraProperties, Boolean validateBeforeCreate, ExecutionContext context)

I’ve highlighted the most important parts of this error message but I’ll break it down below –

• At least one system user or queue in the organization must be a recipient
• -2147218683
• FindBestOwner

basically what this is saying is that CRM is attempting to assign the new record (the email) to the right owner but is failing to do so for some reason that it doesn’t mention in the error message.

The first thing to check with this sort of issue is that the owner that CRM is attempting to assign the new record to is active, has the right permissions and that there aren’t duplicates that CRM may be finding.

The Fix

In my case, the error was appearing when CRM attempted to assign a new email to our support email address which is a queue. As a first step, I checked for any contacts or accounts (active and inactive) which contained the same email address as that’s the most likely cause.

After deleting the automatically created contact the support desk started working again.