Exchange under Mountain Lion

Sgreen0313

Thank you for your valubale advise. I am also now a very happy one that I can use my exchange account without any problems. No need any further complicated solutions described here and Iam afraid some of them could adverse effect on the system.

Once again thank you.

Guralp

Trevorbsmith -- I am pretty sure after the host file change the only thing I did on ical on my system was checked the use SSL box on external server. Same situation with ical as mail it has to be able to resolve whatever the name is in the setting to a IP address that is reachable.

Chris Collins at Apple Tecnical Support, Senior Advisor, sent me a bot and gathered system information on this problem. I was given a phone number to call him. Since then, I cannot get him, no noe on phone in support will help and the case is closed on the system.

I am now on my way to return my new Mac Mini and all peripherals, as well as a new 15" Macbook with retina display I bought at the same time, and will head to best buy for a new Windows-based computer. When I left Windows in 2009, Apple OS was really better. Now, since Snow Leopard, it has not been the best, IMHO, if you are trying to work with an Exchange environment. This is the last straw for me.

Good luck to everyone in resolving this issue.

FriedGreen

Guralp,

Awesome, I'm glad it worked fro you.

UPDATE:

Apple Technical Support Called and this worked:

Open Terminal

Type this in

defaults write com.apple.mail ReautodiscoveryTimerInterval 8640000

hit enter

Go back and make sure your Calendar and Mail Exchange Server settings are correct.

This fixed my problem, and I now can keep my macs!

Update:

The fix I was given by Apple Technical Support works some of the time, but does not fix this.

My IT Department's workaround was to connect via VM Ware for Mac. This is working well, stable, and I can access everything. I believe Apple will correct this in the next release of ML, but based upon my few days and many hours of trying to get this resolved, I am convinced this is a greater problem that auto proxy discovery.

They'll fix it because they want to have Mac users continue to be so, and they know that 95% of the world connects to work through Exchange, and everyone needs their home computer to connect to work.

Just hope they get it done soon.

This doesn't work. Left my MBA for 16 hours and it did not complete resetting the permissions. I ended up closing the box and restarting. Seems fine so far but 0 messages in my inbox even though the Activity monitor is showing that it is syncronising.

Hi guys,

I fix my problem. The problem was not in the Mountain Lion, but in the information send by my Exchange Server by the AutoDiscover feature.

I have to different URL's, one for Webmail and another for Outlook-AnyWhere (the last one is used by Mail App to connect to Exhange), and I shaw that the information send to Mail App was the wrong server address (I set the external server to the rigth address and it continue changing to the wrong one), so I issue the fowlling command in the CAS Server (via Exchange Management Shell):

Get-WebServicesVirtualDirectory |fl identity,internalurl,externalurl (this command gets the url's of the Internal and External server used by the EWS feature, or in other words Outlook AnyWhere)

The result was:

Identity : MYSERVER\EWS (Default Web Site)

InternalUrl : https://MyInternalServer.mydomain.local/EWS/Exchange.asmx

ExternalUrl : https://mail.mydomain.com/ews/exchange.asmx (This information is wrong, and is send to my Mail App)

To fix this I run this command:

Set-WebServicesVirtualDirectory -Identity “MYSERVER\EWS (Default Web Site)” -ExternalUrl https://mobile.mydomain.com/ews/exchange.asmx -BasicAuthentication:$true

The result was:

Identity : MYSERVER\EWS (Default Web Site)

InternalUrl : https://MyInternalServer.mydomain.local/EWS/Exchange.asmx

ExternalUrl : https://mobile.mydomain.com/ews/exchange.asmx (this is the rigth server address)

After this, I reboot the CAS server, and wait about 10 minutes to my Mail App start to work fine, it can take a little longer, so be patient.

The full support for AutoDiscover made by Apple is working, but in my case with the wrong parameters.

I hope this help.

Best Regards,

Tinman

Thank you for sharing Tinman.

Does anyone out here know if having multiple CAS-servers as the InternalUrl might be a problem, even if all addresses are FQDN and completely correct?

We have one ExternalUrl, exposed to the Internet using a Traffic Manager. This ExternalUrl will never change, traffic is always redirected to one of four CAS-servers using a session persistence method.

The InternalUrl is one of four CAS-servers and may change each time you open Mail. Could it be that using multiple "InternalUrl's" is causing Mail to think it's connected to a "new" CAS-server and then checking whether it has some work to do (like checking for NEW messages)? While it discovers a "new" CAS-server, Mail won't display any contents?

What worked for me was the following:

• Remove Exchange account under System Preferences
• Check Mail, Contacts and Calendar for any trace of account.
• Reboot
• Setup Exchange via System Prefs
• Mailbox is correct now

Our autodiscovery is fine, this gives the correct internal and external URLs.

I have been having the same problem with Mail on Mountain Lion (10.8) and an Exchange 2010 server.

My mailbox stopped receiving mail since I upgraded from Snow Leopard (10.6), I checked the settings and it seems the exchange server address was being replaced by Mail itself to a non sensical xxx.xxx.local address.

I have 3 mailboxes, POP, IMAP and this Exchange account, which I deleted, removed the keychain details for (as suggested in a previous post) and then rentered the Exchange account details. This worked for a day until today I found my Exchange mailbox empty.

Not wishing to use the Exchange webmail client I have carried out the following fix as suggested previously:

Edit your /etc/hosts (open terminal and type: sudo pico /etc/hosts) file and on a new line enter the Exchange server IP address followed by a space then the address of the Exchange server as it keeps being replaced by Mail. In my case this would be:

210.123.123.12 exch-cas01.email.local

You should substitute your details in above. You can find the IP address of your Exchange server by using Terminal again and typing:

dig myexchangeserver.com

somewhere in the output will be your Exchange server IP address.

However apparently this is not a permanent fix, so I have also made a change in the OSX Directory Service, hopefully this will make the fix permanent...

(Thanks to this page for the details: http://tomafro.net/2009/07/dscl-the-easy-way-to-add-hosts-on-osx)

Again, open Terminal and type the following, using the local Exchange address that Mail insists on using and the IP address according to the dig command above or your tech support people. For me the command looks like this, remember to substitute your Exchange server address and IP.

sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Hosts/exch-cas01.email.local IPAddress 210.123.123.12

and hit Enter. Hopefully that will fix it, I will report back if it doesn't work for me.

Lets hope Apple release a fix soon...

NB: Once you've made the changes above you may get warnings from Mail saying the certificate is invalid, check the certificate details and if they match your Exchange server details then accept them, you can also set the default action to always trust the certificate.

This didn't work for long, Mail decided to change the Exchange server address to exch-cas02.email.local, so I redited my hosts file to look like the following:

213.176.210.23 exch-cas01.email.local

213.176.210.23 exch-cas02.email.local

213.176.210.23 exch-cas03.email.local

213.176.210.23 exch-cas04.email.local

I'll update using the dscl tool too..

JoshuaIZ,

True the release of Mail.app coincides with the OS yet that does not mean that one is dependent upon the other. To imply this compares, pardon the pun, Apples to Oranges.

If auto-discovery was going to change the basic use-case then this should have been caught in a regression test of Mail.app. At the best it points out to a serious flaw in the automated testing of Mail.app. At worst, it points to a disconnect between Apple and its users.

With the inroads Apple has made in the business community, Mail.app has become an extremely important aspect of the software lineup. Indeed, I prefer Mail.app to Outlook especially when I include MailTags and Mail Act-on. This is serious enough to warrant a hotfix in advance of the general 8.1 update.

At this time, I'm relying upon my iPad for mail. This is great when I'm on the go yet it is a complete impedence to my productivity when I must type long e-mails or send attachments from my shiny new MBP Retina box.

I've tried the various fixes with not much success. I am hoping that the solution of modifying the autodiscover interval will provide me with at least some relief for the short term. However, how many people are not capable of such 'work-arounds'? What about the executives? Or those people who insist on using Macs despite the lack of support from their internal IT organizations?

Those people are now significant portions of Apple's base.

At this point, from this thread and others, its obvious that there is a serious backlash building here. We should see some of that famous Apple support before it breaks wide.

Regards,

Dave

Hosts file edit stopped working for me a few days ago. Since then I cannot send or receive mail and all of the contents of my mailbox have disappeared. Tried rebooting, relaunching Mail, rebuilding mailbox - nothing. Relying on iPhone for Mail until there's a fix.

@XianNewman -

I had the same problem. What I found is that when Mail goes out to the Exchange server and autopopulates the "Internal Server" it will use one of many different servers. For example, if you assigned the external server to ex1.exchangeserver.com, then it may populate with ex2.exchangeserver.com. You can either 1) go back in and edit it back to ex1.exchangeserver.com OR you can go back and assign teh external IP to ex2.exchangeserver.com or any other server that autopopulates (ex3, ex4... you get the idea).

After you save those changes, first try and go to a different mailbox if you ahve one and then go back to the exchange mailbox. If the mail still doesn't show up then go into the Library folder (search the web on how to display it if you need) and then go to mail/V2 and DELETE the entire filder associated with your exchange account. When you re-open mail it will recreate that folder.

Obviously, do all this at your own risk. It worked for me. personally I choose to to go back in and re-edit the internal server to the one I had originally set up.

Hope that helps. Hope the patch is coming in the next software update.