upgrade to Mountain Lion broke my exchange account

This section was over six pages long last night and now it's only 3. Is someone deleting posts?

Every update breaks something. Funny its their own program this time. Although technically a connection to a hire party.

This is a bad time for something like this to happen and hopefully gets resolved quickly. I work for a company whos employees are all mobile, in my delartment anyway Most of the people over the last year have switched away from their crackberries and androids to iPhones. We are still required to carry a work issued pc but many carry a second personal laptop. MacBook airs have become the laptop of choice. There is a big push within the company to switch completely but we can't do it all at once. Since apple doesn't have a real solution for corporations to use instead of EXCHANGE we need that to work.

None of us in our group of over 400 road warriors even have an internal server. We just have a server address that we use for our iPhones and macs. A single address. We do also have an outlook webmail address. Oddly, my internal server keeps changing to the address of the webmail server.

I find it odd that there are FOUR places to set up these servers. In system peers and then the individual peers for mail, calendar and contacts.

I think I know what is the problem but I don't know how to fix it. May be someone out there can.

So I upgraded from Lion OS to Mountain Lion OS. My Gmail and Yahoo mail synched seamlessly in Apple mail, but my work mail (an exchange email account) did not. I deleted it, then re-added it. It synched all my folders but only about 1/4 of my emails (1.2 Gb) then got disconnected. Playing wiht the names of the servers did not help. after rebooting a few times, redeleting it and adding it a few times, nothing worked.

I elected to use my VPN, and sure enough, Apple mail reconnected with my exchange work email account and loads of emails started to flow again!

I never had to use VPN to access my exchange work email account on Snow Leopard or Lion OS. It may be that my work IT network people need to do something to allow Mountain Lion Apple Mail to access the work server without VPN.

Here are some posts from M2zo and myself, ospreytc, that seem to help fix it. But Apple needs to do a proper investigation and much better communication. PLease read copies of both post listed below:

m@zo Germany

Re: Exchange under Mountain Lion

Jul 26, 2012 6:08 AM (in response to dwalthour)

I have to admit, the solution in my case was quite easy:

As opposed to Lion, my server really needs to be placed in the "external server" field, not hte internal. However, mail always fell back to the internal sever (the one not reachable) because of a stupid error: I forgot to turn on SSL for the external server. SSL is activated by default for the internal server, but not for the external server! Silly me

Thanks a lot for all your suggestions. You pointed me in the right direction!

ospreytc

Re: Exchange under Mountain Lion

Jul 27, 2012 3:27 PM (in response to m@zo)

I agree. Under my Prefs, Accounts, I went into "advanced" and saw that one of my SSL blocks was left unchecked. After checking it, I went back to “Account Info” and re-typed my server info into the correct fields (it seems to change those initially). I found a “mail-serv.” type address for my internal server, so I left that as is. The out going server had become black; so I typed an “owa” address into that area. I tried a test from and to myself at the exchange account, and it worked. It is working now for about fifteen minutes. We'll see. When I opened the accounts prefs to check the prafs, I saw that it now correctly contained SSL port info (info was blank previously). It is now listed as 443.

That was last nightS - it is still working.

Previously I used “owa” as my server addresses on my personal MacBook Pro while at work it filled the company server info.

That did it (almost). I am receiving new emails in my exchange inbox but other exchange pst folders are not synchronizing. Baby steps. Thanks ospreytc!

I called Apple Care twice today. First guy, no clue, second woman says they are having massive complaints. I asked if I could downgrade back out of ML so my mail will work. She said she would send me a disk to go back to Snow Leopard. I have no clue why Apple would release ML with either a known bug that prevents Exchange mail from working, or, even worse, not knowing about this problem. I am a big Apple user with multiple devices but this really does give me cause for concern. They need to fix this ASAP and immediately start communicating properly with users about what is going on. I would not have upgraded to ML if I knew I couldn't use my Exchange mail.

I found a much simpler solution to this problem, until they fix it:

I disabled Mail and Notes in my Exchange account and then created an "Exchange IMAP" account for them.

Everything is working fine now (make sure you fix the prefs in Contacts and Calendar after disabling Mail and Notes, as Mail probably messed them up).

Editing the hosts file in /etc worked for me.

Thanks to everyone for their time and help.

Exactly same issue for me, internal & external server names not saving changes.

I know this probably doesn't help, but this morning it suddenly appeared to start working for me. I removed and re-added my Exchange account on my Air yesterday (for the 2nd or 3rd time since upgrading) allowing the system to autodetect the server settings. I ended up with the same issue initially, this morning it also appeared that there were no new e-mails since yesterday, but after rebooting everything just appeared to start working.

I've also just upgraded my MBP to ML, and I'm not having any issues and haven't had to do any fiddling with the existing settings.

Did anyone else here find that it just started working for them, or are you still stuck?

This is really weird because I definitely didn't change anything since yesterday and there were no patches/updates in the meantime.

I'm using Exchange on my mid-2010 iMac and my 2011 MacBook Air. As a test, I upgraded the OS in the Air from Lion to Mountain Lion yesterday. I had the same issue as everyone else.... Exchange didn't connect.

After reading several threads here, what worked for me was to go into Preferences for each of the Exchange-enabled accounts (e.g., Mail, Calendar, and Contacts). For each EXTERNAL SERVER, I added our OWA address (outlook.XXX.com), and checked the SSL checkbox (the SSL box is in the Advanced menu in Mail). I left the Internal server alone, using whatever the program set it to be. After changing the External server address, everything seems to be working OK and it appears to be sticking. I did this last night and this morning on a fresh rerestart of the Air, it appears OK.

My iMac is my master computer so I may not upgrade it to ML until I am sure this fix works.

Hope this helps folks.

After experimenting with Apple Mail disconnected connection to my exchange account after upgrading from Lion OS to Mountain Lion, I found 2 ways of working around the problem:

1) connect through my work VPN (virtual personal network). I never had to use VPN to access my exchange work email account on Snow Leopard or Lion OS. It may be that the IT people at work need to do something to allow Mountain Lion Apple Mail to access the work server without VPN.

Alternatively, 2) since it looks like Apple Mail is changing my internal and external server settings automatically (when Apple mail is running or every time I close and re-launch Apple mail; putting my computer to sleep does nto seem to reset my server names), I had to re-enter the name of my internal server in mail preferences every time I launch Apple Mail and delete my external server (to leave it blank or to paste the same name as the internal server).

Now here’s the weirdest part of the story: sometimes when I launch Apple mail, it looks like the name of my internal server was not modified by Apple Mail, yet my account can still not connect to the exchange server. if I go back to mail preferences and re-save the VERY SAME internal server name (say, if I add a space after the name of the server and save it), it works again!

Obviously, having to re-enter the name of my internal server every time I launch Apple mail (with leaving my external server name blank or the same as my internal server name) is quite annoying, but for now, that’s what is working for me. I’m sure Apple is working on a permanent fix. I’ll let you know if my IT people come up with a better solution. Hope this works for you.

Had the same problem with Exchange everyone is having. Here is what fixed the problem for me:

1. Add the external mail server address (the one that keeps getting deleted every time you quit Apple Mail) in the "Account Information" area, "External Server" field.

2. Check "Use SSL" for the External Port by going to the "Advanced" in the Account area.

I have had no problems since.

Me too. My work Exchange account is broken In preferences My Exchange internal server value keeps changing to an odd value. I reset it, mail will them work, but then it changes back. In addition there certificate trust issues popping up. I guess 'Ill have to use VPN. Bumma!

Can everyone check and confirm something for me. Go into ~/Library/Preferences/ do you see a file called com.apple.mail.plist? After firing up Mail the first time on each account on my macBook I find that this file gets deleted.