Exchange under Mountain Lion

No, I haven't setup multiple accounts. Although I can believe that would cause pain in Exchange / outlook.

Exchange has never worked correctly for me since I moved to ML, slightly improved with 10.8.1 and 10.8.2 in so much that it would connect but pushing mail was unsuccessful and always had to Command, Shift & N to get new mail forced through.

I had the bright idea of deleting the account and re-adding it to try and remedy this issue and now Mail starts to sync my account but stops 10% into the inbox sync. The latest mail I now have is from 8/7/2011.

It works perfectly in iOS.

I honestly don't understand why you can't set up the domain similar to how you do in iOS.

If that model was ported over I'd wager that it would work seamlessly.

Well, Apple has done a lot of work to provide plenty of "wrong" ways of doing this including full interfaces in each applciation and the ablity to upgrade an installed operating system in place which already had the settings. Recommend you let Apple know what they are doing wrong here too so they can correct their product design.

Follow Up - Problems Back : The problems with Calendar and Mail correctly interacting with the MS Exchange 2007 server took longer to resurface but are back in force. Calendar is just as bug infested as before, failing to properly finish it's "Updating..." cycle with Exchange 90% of the time and ending in the "Revert to Server" "Try Again" "Ignore" dialog (Can any MS DOS'er say "Abort" "Retry" "Fail"?! And only appears when talking to MS Exchange? Cruel joke. )

For reference, when talking to the MS Exchange servers, Mail will consume up to 90% of the processor doing little or nothing. This, of course, comes with the PWOD (Pin Wheel Of Death) which is more like Pin Wheel Of Seizure because it will typically un-pinwheel in somewhere between 5 to 10 minutes.

During testing this PWOD condition only occurs when Mail has access to the Exchange server. If Mail can only access the IMAP servers for the other accounts, it is not nearly as flakey.

I have a bug report in with Apple where they asked me to run:

sysdiagnose -t -f ~/Desktop Mail

and I have sent a number of these diagnostics westward. This PWOD lockup happens about 5 times a day for no less than 50 minutes of Mail app seizure. Does a fine job of chewing up my battery as well.

I have sent an email to Tim Cook, and I didn't reallly expect a response... I wasn't disappointed.

That said, this whole situation disappoints me... and Mail w/Exchange is an absolute disaster under Mountain Lion.

I have given up, and switched over to Outlook 2011. Absolutely zero issues whatsoever. 😢

I miss the regular Apple integration of using the stock apps, but I have little hope that this will be truly *fixed*.

I am new here, but I want to add a point that I have the impression is a bit overlooked.

I have to get my mail form our university exchange server.

Automatic setup works fine, I get all the mails, but simply the data transmission rate is slow (around 90 kB/s).

The problem is not the Mail.app (alone). The rate is the same with Outlook/Sparrow and even when I am using a webinterface to the server. What is strange it that at the beginning of downloading a larger attachement the rate goes up to 500-800 kB/s, but only for about 1-2 seconds, then it reduced to the 90 kB/s.

However, the rate is fine (several MB/s) when I am doing it with 10.6 from the same laptop after booting from my bootable backup from Oktober. Our sysad has 10.7, works fine.

Downloud of large attachements from other IMPA servers like gmail works fine (Several MB/s).

I guess, it must be something very basic deep in the OS about the general implementation of the communication with exchange servers.....

It is a relief to know that we are not the only ones whose Mail was pretty much disabled by Lion.

My ISP told me that connections would fail unless I could disable SSL but this I never could do. I would turn it off (uncheck it) and then it would turn itself back on again (recheck the box). Frustrating.

The only thing that worked for me was this weird window that would show up from time to time saying authentication had expired (there's a red dot). By futzing around with this window I eventually made the red dot turn green. That seemed to solve the problem.

Apple has serious issues with upgrades. It has been said, with truth, that Apple doesn't play well with others. But Apple also doesn't play well with itself. Rather sad, really; it used to be a likable company.

jonathan19 wrote:

It is a relief to know that we are not the only ones whose Mail was pretty much disabled by Lion.

My ISP told me that connections would fail unless I could disable SSL but this I never could do. I would turn it off (uncheck it) and then it would turn itself back on again (recheck the box). Frustrating.

I would leave any ISP that required me to run Mail insecurely just for there benefit.

"I would leave any ISP that required me to run Mail insecurely just for there benefit."

Point taken. But it would have been nice to have been able to turn off SSL temporarily until the underlying Mail issue was fixed. After all, the ISP help could only test its own system, which it did using its webmail. Once it was clear the issue was in Mail itself (or Lion) their ability to help was pretty limited.

Interpret it any way you choose, but your email would have been in the open had you been able to follow the instructions, and that is the way your ISP recommended.

I would find a more sensible provider.

I appreciate it for what it was: a honest attempt to help and diagnose the issue. Running your mail long term without SSL/TLS probably isn't a good idea, BUT your ISP sees ALL of your mail anyway, since they're operating the mail server. (Of course, you might be using pgp or S/MIME, in which your mail is actually private, but otherwise, both mail server operators can easily see it, and everyone in between.)

I do believe that the fundamental problem is in the SSL/TLS stack implementation. It *might* involve the interface to keychain. But I have seen reports on the apple TLS stack being very finicky. I think the difference is that when the stack got *very* selective, the otherwise "okay" exchange API started to show some cracks. I would bet it believes as gospel what the stack says, and if it can't negotiate with the server (ocsp issue, crl, certificate chain, etc) the mail.app just gives up.

But mail.app's enormous flaw here is that it logs / reports nothing. So how to tell what broke!?

4 months later and still have the same issues. Very similar to what others here have reported. Works fine in Outlook for Mac, iOS, etc. But nothing but headaches on 10.8. Ugh.

This is unacceptable. Mail is very buggy under Mountain Lion. It fails to retrieve from the server in a timely manner, often gets stuck sending emails with attachments (the outbox appears way more often than it used to) and the app hangs when I try to shut it down. I've had to force quit out of Mail more than any application I've ever used.

I'm switching back to Outlook for Office Mac. Works quite well and fast compared to Mail. I'll miss some of the interface features of Mail, and asthetically, MicroSoft still doesn't quite get it, but I need to work. Thank goodness I have a viable alternative.

Mail is perhaps the most buggy part of Mac OS X. As email is core to most user's computing world, is MS Outlook on Windows perhaps the better alternative? Outlook on Windows is far better than Outlook on Mac... As a professional, if mail/calendar/contacts are not working, my work life is **** no matter what else is available on the system. If Apple can't produce a viable email / calendar / contacts solution then maybe it is time to consider switching to Windows 7? After all, windows has come a long way with Windows 7 to be more Mac-like. Dunno.

Windows has its own irritations and I enjoy pretending I'm immune to all the viruses and malware out there. I'm not mad enough to ditch Mac just yet. Plus, one of the things that pulled me over to Mac to begin with was all the beautiful software from developers. I don't see as much innovation from windows developers. You're right about the work aspect though. I'm sure PC Outlook is better but for now, the Mac version works fine. Glad MS keeps supporting it. Apple has clearly ceased development of iWork.

You now it's funny, Mail on IOS actually works great with exchange. Why not on ML? Come on Apple!