Exchange under Mountain Lion

smittyrocks wrote:

one exchange account isn't a problem, never has been. The 'disappering email and folders' issue only occurs when you add two or more Exchange accounts all polling the same server, such as mail.company.com. You single account will work forever with no issue.

I have only one Exchange account, and the problem - external host name being replaced by the internal one, only new mail being shown after fixing this, etc - appear in this scenario as well.

To repeat: One exchange account is a problem, and probably the normal case here.

There are two seperate issues here that are getting commingled and confused.

First issue was in LION, if two Exchange accounts with the same sever name were setup in Mail, it would cause emails & folders to disappear. This issue was never reoslved and is still present in Mountain Lion.

Second issue appeared in MOUNTAIN LION, the server name gets changed from what the user originally sets up Mail with and the user is unable to get mail at all.

The LION issue only effected users with 2 Exchange accounts on the same server. The MOUNTAIN LION issue can effect any Mail setup, no matter how many Exchange accounts are setup.

My response was regarding the LION issue of having two accounts on the same server.

To make things even more confusing and this is why this thread is becoming commingled and difficult is that it is possible for a user to experience both the LION & MOUNTAIN LION issue. They can resolve the MOUNTAIN LION issue by using the etc/host workaround only to then find out that they now encounter the LION issue because they have two exchange accounts that are both checking via the same server name, and at this point their folders disappear.

Bottom line is Apple needs to resolve BOTH issues immediately because they have been effecting some users since Lion came out and have not only gotten worse since Mountian Lion was released.

smittyrocks wrote:

There are two seperate issues here that are getting commingled and confused.

First issue was in LION, if two Exchange accounts with the same sever name were setup in Mail, it would cause emails & folders to disappear. This issue was never reoslved and is still present in Mountain Lion.

see post below

Csound1 wrote:

smittyrocks wrote:

There are two seperate issues here that are getting commingled and confused.

First issue was in LION, if two Exchange accounts with the same sever name were setup in Mail, it would cause emails & folders to disappear. This issue was never reoslved and is still present in Mountain Lion.

Mail does not support more than 1 Exchange account, and i don't know of anything that does (Outlook is limited to 1 as well) The workaround in Outlook is to create 2 seperate profiles and login to the one you want, in OSX you would need 2 user profiles, one for each account.

Following @smittyrocks lead I also sent a not to Tim Cook.

Guess what? I actually received a call from Apple today. I was surprised, and glad that they were showing some initiative on this.

I was put in touch with a Sr. Engineer and we were on the phone for about an hour and a half. He mirrored my computer and we replicated the problem. I gave him the URL to this thread (say hi) and we did a scan of my system. We opened up my Microsoft Outlook and reviewed all the settings. He was noticiably surprised at the depth and lenght of this thread - so I can veify that this particular threa has indeed been seen by someone at Apple.

He noticed some issues with the autopoplation and server names within mac mail. He asked me to contact my Exchange host and get some information to send over to him, which I did.

He stated that we would be back in touch on Monday after the team had a chance to review all of the data they pulled off of my computer.

For what it's worth (not a ton with we are all experiencing business downtime) they were very sympathetic, knowlegeable, and patient with me. The tech was exploring a lot of different options to see how and why this problem was occuring in real time.

The answer may not come out tomorrow, but I at least know without a shadow of a doubt that they are aware of the issue and are taking it seriously.

Hope that takes the edge of for some of you.

awd

Csound1 - not sure why you think that, but OS X Mail most certainly does support multiple exchange accounts, so does Outlook 2010, Outlook 2011 for Mac, & iOS.

I just got off the phone with an Apple rep as well. This is a step in the right direction.

smittyrocks wrote:

Csound1 - not sure why you think that, but OS X Mail most certainly does support multiple exchange accounts, so does Outlook 2010, Outlook 2011 for Mac, & iOS.

Yes, I'm out of date, but only 2010, from Microsoft I got the info that 2010 will support 3 in a single profile, all earlier versions support 1 per profile

http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-outlook/archive/2009/08/25/multiple-exchange -accounts-in-outlook-2010.aspx

There is a caveat:

What’s the catch?

Your additional Exchange accounts function just like your first Exchange account in almost every way. Some things, however, are different. For example, the To-Do Bar shows appointments only from your default store, not those from additional Exchange account calendars. To view which store is your default click the Office button, then Account Setting, then, choose the Data Files tab.

I have a very similar issue. What happens is that everytime I set the external server on Mail, it resets to a different one next time I close and restart the app. And I dont receive any mail until I change the settings to what it was. Several posters have reported this in the thread.

I checked the outlook configuration (on a windows machine, using MS Outlook you can test email config by control-clicking on the outlook icon next to the clock on the bottom right) and I saw that the Exchange server autodiscover service had been misconfigured with the wrong external server that Mac Mail keeps reverting to. So my hunch is that Mac Mail pings the exchange server and changes the config to what it reports even though you may have entered a different server address.

I checked with my IT support and they initially checked the config on the server and reported it was all correct. On further investigation, they discovered that on the command prompt using the command:

Get-WebServicesVirtualDirectory |fl identity,internalurl,externalurl

and they realized on the autodiscover service the external server is configured to the wrong address that Mac Mail keeps reverting to!

I am trying to get them to update it, but they have not done so yet. I will report back if I have any better luck with Mac Mail after they update MS Exchange server with the new settings.

For more detail on the Microsoft side of the post, do refer to this post which was very useful:

http://premnair.wordpress.com/2010/07/03/configure-ews-autodiscover-owa-oab-ecp- on-exchange-server-2010/

They also called me last Friday to investigate the case.

I just want to inform you that since I put what I said at page 10, I don't have any problem anymore... you should try

I have perhaps only luck

Nice this also seems to work for me...

- I changed the User Name from "username" to "domain\username"

- Quite & restarted Mail

- the Internat Server is changed to the incorrect one however I can send & receive mail normally 🙂

Note under "Advanced" I have ticked both "Use SSL" - did this early and did not help however not I left them ticked and it works with the above fix

Thank you iMat_intel 😀

We are getting affected by the "Moutain Lion Issue"

We are using a hosted exchange server solution. I have implemented the hosts workaround and I can collect my email okay now - however my contacts refuses to sync with the Exchange global address list. It fails with the error - "soapwebserviceserrordomain error -1"

Has anyone experienced this issue? Seems strange as the hosts file appears to work successfully for the majority of people here. I potentially think it’s due to a certificate issue. When completing the hosts file workaround I had to select “always trust” the exchange server certificate as the name of the certificate (the actual server name not reachable by our clients) didn’t match the name in the hosts file (the load balanced address which can be reached by our clients). This worked fine for the mail app, but could be affecting contacts is some way?

Anyway I’d be keen to know if anyone else is getting this.

Cheers

I'm not sure what all has been discussed in this thread, and unfortunately I do not have time to go back and read all of it; however, this is what I can inform everyone of.

For those experiencing issues with Mac Mail and Exchange Server URLs changing on them, it is related to a feature of Exchange Server called Autodisocvery. Autodiscovery works in such a way that it populates clients with the email settings upon initial connection. In other words - this is a server level setting that is being pushed out and you as an employee or individual would have to consult your IT department to confirm its proper setup. If it has not been setup correctly then it is possible to continue to experience this issue. Unforunately, if you are still experiencing this issue, there is nothing you will be able to do about it (at least that I'm aware of). The two options are one - Apple reverts to its previous settings before the release of Mountain Lion in however they had Exchange services set up. Two - you contact your IT department and have them verify the settings and make any needed adjustments.

I can confirm that if MS Exchange Autodiscovery has been proprery setup then you will no longer experience this issue.

A different issue - on the other hand - is the fact that Mail is not receiving pushed email (from Exchange accounts) for whatever reason. Unless you do a manual check for new messages or adjust the time under Mail > Settings, you will not see new messages appear in your inbox.

Hopefully this helps... If it is a repeat of any information, please disregard.

@smittyrocks@Csound1

As mentioned already, Mac Mail does support multiple MS Exchange accounts. I can confirm. I currently have two operable. I also have mutliple Exchange accounts on my iOS devices. In terms of MS Outlook, I don't know about the Mac version, but depending on what Window's version you have, it too supports multiple Exchange accounts.