"Cannot Get Mail - The connection to the server failed" problem SOLVED

NeoDavid.

Yes, this worked PERFECTLY on Exchange 2010

Clicking “Include inheritable permissions from this object’s parent” was the fix I needed.

Thanks very much!

@NeoDavid

I know this almost 10 months later, but thanks! This was right on the money.

I'm prototyping Exchange 2010 with my iPhone 4 and - apparently - the only thing I didn't have setup correctly was the inheriting permissions from parent objects on my AD user. I changed it and within a minute the test email my iPhone couldn't send showed up in my Gmail account, my Inbox had messages, and I could browse my folders.

Nice work!

This worked for me. My gmail account worked and not yahoo when pulled up seperately. I deleted the yahoo account and reactivated it with the updated password.

Have you guys noticed, that when this happens, the affected user also cannot access OWA webmail via OS X? Very strange, they can pull up their calendar, but not the inbox. I still don't have a reliable fix for this, as the problem is intermittent, reoccurring, and doesn't affect the entire user-base. The Inherit permissions fix did not work reliably for me. Sometimes archiving the messages out of the inbox works, sometimes it doesn't.

NeoDavid,

You rock man! This was exactly my issue. As soon as I changed the permissions to inherit for all my active sync users, everything start working.

Something that worked for us... make sure the user name is fully qualified. Exampl: "domain/username" We were getting the error message listed and then made the change and it worked.

You ROCK NeoDavid. This saved many hours of grief and fixed the problem immediately. Thanks for sharing this with the community.

After searching a ton of forums neoDavid your suggestion fixed my problem. Now i have no issue sending and receiving email whether or not i am on wifi or 3g

Thank you so much! This has has been frustrating me for months. Your suggestion worked immediately. Thanks again for posting.

Thought I'd share our solution, as none of the other fixes suggested in this thread worked for us. Our issue turned out to be with our ISA server (Proxy). It was set to only allow 20 simultaneous connections. As the number of mobile devices on our network increased, there was a lot of competition for one of those 20 spots. Thus, it would refuse connection to the unlucky ones. We increased the allowed connections, and the issue went away.

Interestingly, Android phones were not impacted by this problem.

I fixed this issue easily.

Settings...general...reset...reset network settings.

Very SIMPLE and it worked for me.

Thanks so much for this! In Feb 2012 we put in Exchange 2010 and several phones and my iPad broke with Exchange OWA. This setting in AD fixed it!

I tried just about everything here to no avail... iOS 5.1, exch 2003. Deleted/re-added a number of times... The mail was downloading up until a certain point, then gave the "Cannot Get Mail - The connection to the server failed" error.

Then when I changed the sync limit from "no limit" to "1 day" the newer stuff downloaded, skipping everything in between. I went up to 3 days and same thing. The fix here has nothing to do with the time limit, but more so that it was one corrupt message in her inbox that was causing the downloads to just fail and crash and burn.

I went into her inbox and deleted the first message that was not downloaded, and voila, problem solved, the error went away.

What was that message? It was an e-mail received from someone using the emoji app, which this user had also installed. These messages basically take obscure UNICODE characters and substitute an emoticon in the e-mail; if you look at the same message in Outlook it will look like this:

���⛽ ⚠ ��� ♨������������� and so forth. The app then substitutes the characters back to the icons.

Some of these messages had come through fine, this one particular did not. I don't know if it was randomly corrupt on the server or if it was just an obscure character that crashed it.

Consquently, emoji is actually built right into iOS itself and the third party app isn't even necessary. The difference is Apple's built-in version probably has a lot less options. To enable this, go to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> International Keyboards -> Add New Keyboard... -> scroll through the alphabetical list and add "Emoji" ... On the keyboard input the user then can hit the globe icon and select the emoji icons.

Thank you, this solution worked for my users when all others did not.