Exchange under Mountain Lion

EmmanuelMD - I am in no way saying that this is not Apples problem. It's why I've been resistant to do any of the fixes, such as the one that @garretn continues to suggest. I was hopeful that Apple would come to a solution and not require me to become a software engineer in order to make my computer "just work."

It would not be unlike Apple to know they have a problem, and quietly fix it while blaming everyone else in the world. It's very unusual for Apple to acknowledge that they've messed up, but they do usually come up with a solution even if they don't make that public.

Once the new patch is released, if we are all still having problem, then I'll do my best to take this forum very public. I'm a small almost in-audible voice but I'll be posting all over Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, - **** I might even post something on Google plus 😉.

Because Apple made a change in how the OS works there are several of us who have bucked the trend and decided to use Apple for business that are being left out in the cold. It's a step backwards. A lot of us are self employeed. Email and calendars are all we have and we rely on our very very expensive machines to handle this for us.

I am an expert in my field. I am not an expert in Software. It scares the **** out of me every time I have to open Terminal or delete Library folders. I know a lot of your are very comfortable doing that, but I'm not - but here is the point - I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO BE.

Good luck.

awdavis55 - You are 100% correct we shouldnt have to come up with workarounds to make are software work. I find it hard to believe this issue didnt come during the beta testing. You might give that hosts file entry a try I really dont think you can mess it up and it might just fix your connectivity issue until Apple decides to address it.

We all with have to be careful when jumping the rest of our Apple devices onto IOS 6 since I dont think we will have the flexibility to come up with these workarounds. That will be a deal breaker for me since most of the time I am on the road and rely on my phone getting emails and calendars.

Garretn -

I did do the redirection in terminal and it seems to be working. I can actually pull up my calendar and the most recent messages are now visible. I can even send mail (!!!!) but - it's only populated about a 1/5th of my in box. Any idea what that might be or how i can force it to download the rest?

If I am not wrong, Auto discovery was implemented in iPhone Software 2.0. Check the link below. I am guessing it has always been there since then in iOS.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/03/06Apple-Announces-iPhone-2-0-Software-Be ta.html

Rich Boys - try this for your empty mailbox problem. I had the same issue and this fixed it:

shut down

then turn on computer while holding command R

when OS Utilities window comes up go to the top menu bar and click Utilities, then Terminal.

type (all one word, lower case): reset password

hit return

go to the bottom of the reset password window that comes up,

select the HD

then click the Reset button at the bottom under "Reset Home Folder Permission and ACLs"

then wait for it to finish

click the red button to close the finder.

then go to Terminal at top,

Quit Terminal.

Then restart under the apple logo icon.

...This resets the Permissions for all the applications in your computer and refreshes a lot of things that cause bugs, so says Apple support.

EmmanualMD, try this for your empty mailbox problem. It solved that same problem for me:

shut down

then turn on computer while holding command R

when OS Utilities window comes up go to the top menu bar and click Utilities, then Terminal.

type (all one word, lower case): reset password

hit return

go to the bottom of the reset password window that comes up,

select the HD

then click the Reset button at the bottom under "Reset Home Folder Permission and ACLs"

then wait for it to finish

click the red button to close the finder.

then go to Terminal at top,

Quit Terminal.

Then restart under the apple logo icon.

...This resets the Permissions for all the applications in your computer and refreshes a lot of things that cause bugs, so says Apple support.

My company only allows us to keep 45 days on the server and I got all of mine. I had setup a rule to copy any email from exchange to a local folder so i always had a copy. Sorry I don't know of another setting for that in Mail.

Hello all - been tracking this thread since it launched as I have the same basic problem as others. Autodiscovery in Mail keeps overriding the account settings I put in. If I change them manually, Mail will work fine - but if I quit the application or restart the computer they change again. So I can keep changing them manually but it's a hassle and unnecessary. I haven't seen any interim solutions that will stop Mail from overriding the settings I put in (or at least none that I can understand as a techie novice). Seriously hoping that Apple will address this in their next update. Any guidance from fellow users would be most welcome.

Solved.

I found the solution to the central problem described in this thread (notwithstanding some completely unrelated peripheral issues persistent since Lion, according to others on this board). And no one here is going to like it, because you can't fully solve it without help from your corporate Microsoft administrator friends. But I've tested it and it's true.

Mountain Lion 10.8's "full implementation" of Microsoft Exchange autodiscovery is quite dictatorial. It's also fully consistent with Apple's pronouncement in its TS4363: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4363viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

What Mountain Lion does is check regularly with Exchange autodiscovery and reset the external server to what it's told from the Exchange server. This would be a good thing if you ever changed your server-side settings; it would update seamlessly. But it's a bad thing if you rely on overriding that autoconfiguration manually on your Mac to make things work.

Once I described the problem and this board to our (outsourced) IT people, they looked at our Exchange server and found that the prescribed "external server" for autodiscovery on the Exchange server had been left blank. So it was sending the internal server for both.

While the /etc hosts workaround did function partially for me, having the Exchange server properly configured to send via autodiscovery the full and correct external settings is the only full solution to the problem.

So it's your choice who to blame: your Microsoft Exchange administrator for not fully configuring the server, or Apple for making it impossible to override manually the autodiscovery function to compensate.

Or you can just set aside blame and live happily forever after in harmony with your imperfect surroundings. Namaste.

I'm glad that has worked for you but many IT departments are unable or unwilling to change these settings to accomodate less than 1% of their user base.

I've been trying and gotten nowhere. Just to clarify - my IT department uses another company to handle email and VPN and even after contacting their tech support repeatedly all they can say is "we'll look into it but we can't promise anything". They then state that it's working for most people [read: Windows users] and they don't want to change anything.

Just for this reason, we should be given the option to use Autodiscovery or not. It's a simple fix and would also solve the problem for everyone.

Sandbridge -- Only one issue with your solution.. My external server settings are not the issue it's the internal server that is being overwritten with the local address which is not reachable from the outside. It appears that Mail doesn't check the internal and find it not reachable then check the external to see if it can reach that address. It just fails at Internal not reachable.

I'm glad you are up and going but I don't think everything is 100%.. I hope i'm wrong.

I agree with you. A select box in Mountain Lion settings that turns autodiscovery on or off would be the ideal solution.

Maybe someone at Apple is listening.

We can only hope 🙂

I just referenced your post and asked AGAIN for my provider to at least check the settings so we will see.

Maybe if I keep bugging them we will get somewhere. And maybe if enough people keep bugging Apple they will add the select box.

Sandbridge is absolutley correct on this. I understand everyone thinks "it worked in Lion, so the bug must be in Mountain Lion". It's really the other way around, Lion and SL didn't do autodiscovery properly, it wasn't updating the server name as it's suppose to, but now it it in ML it is. I agree with other posters that Apple could simply add a "Do not check autodiscovery" and this would resolve the issue 100%

I just had my Exchange admin run the following command and the results in Mail.app are exactly what he got from the command. It shows the internal server name (ex1) as the internal server and no server was assigned to the external. I'm having him make the change now so that internal server of ex1. and the external server name of mail. is set properly.

Send this to your excahnge admins. Have them run this shell command on the server:

Get-WebServicesVirtualDirectory |fl identity,internalurl,externalurl

After working with Apple Support (no help) and reading this thread (lots of help) I was able to get Mail and Calendar working with my Exchange 2010 server!! For me, the internal server name kept changing. I went to Keychain Access and deleted the saved incorrect internal server password, and mail started working. Then I opened Calendar, deleted the Exchange Account, recreated it, then deleted the saved incorrect internal server password (again) and all appears to be working. Not certain why this is happening, but as all of you by now know, it is very frustrating not to be able to trust what you are seeing online for scheduling.

Thanks to those of you who posted the solution I used.

UPDATE: OK, after closing Mail and Calendar, and then relaunching, same problem. Autodiscovery must be returning the incorrect internal server name. Oh, wekk, it was stable while I kept the programs open. Surely Apple will fix this in the next upgrade.