Email in Exchange inbox disappear in Mail

I've been having the same problem, and it was driving me crazy. You solved it! Thank you, thank you, thank you!!

Will be interesting to hear in a week or two how it goes with your mail, erinfromga.

My personal experience with Outlook on Mac OS is mixed, but that is now some years ago.

Just a word to say that this issue affects me, as well—only since Mountain Lion, and only on Mountain Lion, and only on my MB Air (my iMac on campus hasn't had these problems—yet). Randomly, my Inbox will show only a handful of messages (all those from the last 1-2 days, plus 2-5 other messages), and every other mailbox (I have about a dozen or so) shows 0 messages. Restarting the program and restarting the computer do not help. I have unchecked the "autodiscover" and rebuilt the mailboxes, so we'll see how much that helps. What intrigues me—and suggests this problem is on Apple's end—is that the problem does not appear at all on my iPad or iPhone, but unfortunately, their search capabilities are rather more limited.

My work requires me to use Exchange, so no options there. Given how intrusive, annoying, difficult to use, buggy, virus-infectable, and commercially penetrable Microsoft software tends to be, I'd prefer not to use Outlook.

Rob Rushing wrote:

What intrigues me—and suggests this problem is on Apple's end—is that the problem does not appear at all on my iPad or iPhone,

That's because they use a different method to connect.

Your Mac is using EWS, the iThings use ActivSync, a protocol that Microsoft do not support on a Mac or a PC (unless the PC is running Outlook 2013)

So no surprise there.

Interesting observation Rob, that I have not thought about, that when being on our campus net the mail behaves fine, and shows all messages in the "in-box", but Mail has hiccups when being outside campus (on both my nice iMac and very nice MacBook Air).

I have tried to disable/enable the outdiscover function and rebuilding etc, and then it seems to work for some time/days and then not. Very annoying issue.

One thing I have noticed, is that the link to the exchange server seems to be "off-line" - indicated with a "~" besides the name to the exchange server, while my "iCloud" e-mail account" seem to be online all the time.

I don't know what to make of this, but it might be interesting to know if others have seen this behavior.

Hi Everyone,

For those experiencing this issue Exchange server throttling may be the cause.

Ask your Exchange Server administrator to check their Application Event log to see if your user account has gone "over budget".

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/exchange/en-US/e743b2b1-1117-421d-9ee 4-48a5255b0d34/event-id-2915-user-has-gone-over-budget

My guess is that Exchange 2013 has much more strict throttling settings than 2010 and that Mac mail has not been updated with the new limits.

If you're friendly with your exchange admin, they may even create a new throttling policy for Mac Mail. I just did this and our Mac mail users are now happily connecting.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/exchangedev/archive/2011/06/23/exchange-online-throttlin g-and-limits-faq.aspx

Steve

As all of you know, I guess, Apple released an update for Mountain Lion the 12th of September (OS X v.10.8.5) that, among other thing "Fixes an issue that may prevent Mail from displaying messages".

I am curious to hear if that fix addressed the problem with disappering mails which is described in this discussion? What are your experience?

George

I was experiencing email that would not display in Mail for OSX 10.8, I peformed the update on the 12th and have been using email daily and I have not encountered any emails that would not load. the Mail app appears to be behaving nicely.

Sadly the update to v.10.8.5 didn't solve the problem completely at my Mac (MacBook Pro, Retina).

The situation is better, i.e. the content of mail folders does not "disappear" as often as before, but I still need to restart the Mail program every day (but not every hour as before).

I had the same problem with an outlook.com account.

I solved it by deleting inbox subfolder and recreate it as folder instead.

I am still experiencing this issue on a daily basis. I can only assume most of you are still? I have updated to both 10.8.5 and 10.9 on some of my machines. It continues on all of them.

The solution in my original message continues to work for me in OS9 as restated here.

I think I might have a solution to the problem discussed in this and similar discussions about Exchange failing to show the mail in the Inbox, requiring either a rebuild of the mailbox or reopening Apple Mail to only temporarily fix the problem.

I noticed in Apple Mail's Preferences on the Exchange account's 'Account Information' pane that the Internal server kept changing from time to time. I further noticed that there was a tick box above this labelled "Use Autodiscover Service" that was ticked. When I unticked this box (thus not allowing the server to periodically change), the problem SEEMS to have disappeared after about 4 days of use. Previously I was having the above problem multiple times in a single day.

I had a similar problem some time ago where mail was not syncing reliably between my various computers all pointing to the same (non-Exchange in this case) account. When I made sure the identical server was selected (my University has more than one all handing mail as is the case presently with multiple Exchange servers appearing on different days as described above), my computers all synced reliably. So it occurred to me that the same problem might be happening, i.e., one server would provide data to the Inbox but then Autodiscover would switch to another server and the mail would disappear. I hasten to note this is just my conjucture but so far (fingers crossed) the inbox has not had to be rebuilt.

I hope this helps solve the disappearing inbox problem and maybe even other posters' reference to failures to sync.

Thank you Kimron, trying that next - my own (recently deleted and re-added exchange account) also had this AutoDiscover checked and the server name changed; so I unchecked and changed it to match my personal laptop. Trying that config now.

Recap:

I have a 2011 MacBook Air running 10.8.5 (Mail.app 6.6) that I routinely connect to 3 IMAP accounts a POP account and my employer's Exchange account. It never has a ploblem, always works. My work provided MacBook Pro (2011, 10.8.5 with Mail 6.6) would frequently display no messages in the Exchange inbox (it connects only to two IMAPs and the Exchange). I would have to either quit/restart Mail or pull down Rebuild mailbox, several times a day. I created new UNIX accounts on the work Mac, the problem would go away for a while (2-3 days) and re-appear. This problem persisted through since running Leopard (10.5) and all versions since. It has even followed to a brand new 2013 MacBook Air work gave me creating new account and through migration assistant. It is easier to work around since SSD on the Air is so bloody fast I can quit/restart or rebuild mailbox in seconds now... but problem persists.

Co-workers also have this problem - no issue on their personal laptop; having the inbox show up empty several times a day. There is one guy who freqently cannot send mail through Exchange.

It just crashed again (Mail.app 6.6) - Grrr!

Interesting, when I navigate to ~/Library/Mail/V2 I see several exchange mailboxes - that seems wrong to me...

I wonder if the AutoDiscover crap is renaming the servers and confusing Mail.app client?

drwxr-xr-x@ 14 snolan staff 510 Nov 8 2012 EWS-Scott.Nolan@neustar.biz@stntexchcas01.cis.neustar.com

drwxr-xr-x@ 13 snolan staff 476 Oct 24 09:22 EWS-snolan@eastcoastcas.cis.neustar.com

drwxr-xr-x@ 15 snolan staff 544 Nov 7 2012 EWS-snolan@stntexchcas01.cis.neustar.com

drwxr-xr-x@ 4 snolan staff 136 May 8 11:01 EWS-snolan@stntexchcas02.cis.neustar.com

To everyone.

Real Simple Solution. Dump Apple Mac Mail.app and go to ANY OTHER Email client and you will never have these problems again.