Who is this article for?

CS Engineers troubleshooting filing issues.

SharePoint site access is required.

The "Error: File already exists. But metadata update failed" error can occur when a customer is trying to file emails to SharePoint but doesn't have metadata enabled on SharePoint.

Metadata is required for mail manager to update emails with things like date/time additions to the subject etc.

Set up metadata navigation for a list or library article from Microsoft covers steps for how to setup and use metadata.

This includes more steps than are needed to just activate metadata in SharePoint and, so I have pulled out the relevant steps for only activating metadata and added these below as well.

To enable metadata for SharePoint only:

1. Go to the list or library where you want to add metadata.
2. Click Settings.
3. Select Site Settings.
4. Click Manage site features (under Site Actions)
5. Find Metadata Navigation and Filtering.
6. Click Activate.

If this doesn't work, the issue might be caused by misconfigured metadata columns in SharePoint.

For example we have had a customer with the same error. They had one metadata column set as "Lookup", when they changed this column type to "Single line of text" this resolved the error.