Exchange servers and Mavericks Mail

According AppleInsider: 'Apple on Tuesday seeded the latest OS X 10.9.1 beta build to developers, bringing minor changes to the upcoming maintenance update as it inches closer to public release.'

But in the release notes there is NO mention of Exchange, only additional resolved Gmail issues.

And according to an Apple support engineer I recently spoke to (who specializes in corporate security): there is no internal awareness (or mention among those in the corporate space that he speaks with) regarding an Exchange issue. He suggested that we log in this (new) issue as developers as a prelude to proving log files and such.

And that I shouldn't take seriously everything I read in this forum. Which maybe I wouldn't if there weren't 173 posts all pretty much describing the very same experience that we are having!

*** is going on?

That's what I'm talking about. They insist that our problem is on the exchange side because the mac mail log files do not show anything indicative of an issue on their side. Yet we can all attest that our mail worked flawlessly when we had Mountain lion. The only change and I mean only change on our side has been the upgrade to Mavericks.

Coincidentally I was working with a level two engineer at Microsoft regarding exchange 2013 for a client yesterday. I explained the situation regarding mavericks Mac mail and exchange. I told him that Apple has been telling me that it's an exchange issue and that the burden lies on Microsoft to fix the problem. He stated that Apple is aware of the specifications to integrate with Microsoft exchange. They obviously have no problems with mail on their iOS platforms. Yeah they have issues with their OS X Mavericks Mac mail. Pretty obvious to this engineer where the problem lies. Speaking of lies we should all send letters to higher-ups at Apple to get some attention. Losing a few hundred Mac users will not hurt them but maybe we can raise enough awareness that they will reach out to us to figure out what's going on.

Randy

FYI, although this seems by far the largest forum on the subject, if you seach: 'Mavericks Mail Exchange' there are literally dozens of separate forums on the subject here: in aggregate comprising close to the same number of views and more answers compared with this forum. I tallied > 40,000 views and > 400 answers on the subject after visiting the first two dozen, including this forum. This does not include calendar and other related Exchange issues.

Thanks all. This is quite maddening. Mavericks Mail was so bad for me that I decided to switch to Outlook 2011, which is free from my Exchange provider. I wanted to share two specific problem areas.

1. I had no trouble with the basic setup/synching. Yet I could not move to Outlook the archived emails I store locally. Mail's mbox format has changed in a way that makes it unreadable by Outlook. I have seen lots of comments about this, and refrences to third party solutions, but none worked for me. Almost everywhere I look, FAQs do not recognize that exportingin mbox will no longer work as it once did.

2. My "workaround" was to put these locally stored emails (which are organized into folders) back onto the Exchange server, in the hopes I could synch in Oultook and then move off the server and store locally within Outlook. Even though I bought lots of additional storage on the Exchange server and moved a few file folders at a time, I found that some files were dropped and some subfolders never synched. I do not think it makes sense of me to do this one email at a time as I would have to keep track of thousands and confirm every one moved.

I am losing my hair as it is, and this is causing much more pain than it should. Apple does not support Outlook so they point me to MS. MS points to Exchange. Exchange points to Apple and MS. A circular firing squad.

Anyone have a suggestion?

thx

Alan in DC

I am just completely flabbergasted at Apple's response and lack of urgency on this issue. This thread has over 22,000 views....I don't think it's just a small handful of users. I went through this problem in detail with two support people and one of them was a mail specialists. How could they ignore all the feedback on this thread and the direct feedback from their users via phone calls? Amazing.....truly disappointed.

I have 27000+ messages in my inbox.

In an effort to get this working over EWS I deleted the entire account and purged the system of any reference to it. I then readded the mail account. 512 messages were added to the inbox imediately. It then took about 4 weeks for the message count to get up to 27000. However even now email comes in sporadically - sometimes taking hours to appear. My IMAP connection to the same mailbox via Mail operates normally.

Knmlee, I tried virtually all the solutions discussed on the board, including deleting and rebuilding my exchange account multiple times...at first, Outlook worked while Mail didn't, but that went south pretty soon, too...after that I tried AirMail...worked for about a week, then it would no longer automatically get email from the server--had to restart the program to get mail. At the same time, kernal_task was swelling to nearly 5 gigs, causing me to have to restart the machine several times a day due to no operating memory, even when no programs were running.

I finally deleted my exchange account, then deleted accounts.plist, then re-added the exchange account.....once I did that, the memory problems I was having went away and my emails downloaded just fine...

randyKates, I have roughly a third of the messages you have, so that could certainly be a factor...

I have heard that this build of Mavericks (10.91) Mail (7.1) is still broken with respect to sendmail via an Exchange server. While mail is noticibly faster, any message containing a file attachment > 60K simply refuses to be sent via Exchange sendmail. Curiously, the outgoing mail appears in the "On my Mac" subfolder of the Outbox even though it is being sent via an Exchange server. After a period of "sending message: Adding Messages" the system times out and indicates that the Exchange sendmail server cannot send the mail.

acarruthers wrote:

I have heard that this build of Mavericks (10.91) Mail (7.1) is still broken with respect to sendmail via an Exchange server. While mail is noticibly faster, any message containing a file attachment > 60K simply refuses to be sent via Exchange sendmail. Curiously, the outgoing mail appears in the "On my Mac" subfolder of the Outbox even though it is being sent via an Exchange server. After a period of "sending message: Adding Messages" the system times out and indicates that the Exchange sendmail server cannot send the mail.

I started noticing a similar thing to you. Anything with an attachment takes several tries to send.

I also had to disable my iCloud email on my work machine- mail INSISTED on ALWAYS sending from the iCloud account, rather than the account the message was from or the one set as the default in preferences.

arrj wrote:

Is anyone else getting this in their Console error log?

I haven't had the time or energy to raise a case with Apple on this, so if people could check and add to any open cases, perhaps it might get them moving.

29/11/2013 5:16:21.638 pm Mail[920]: *** Assertion failure in -[MFEWSSyncFolderItemsResponseMessageOperation handleResponseMessage:withObject:], /SourceCache/Mail/Mail-1822/FrameworkTargets/MailFramework/EWS/MFEWSResponseOpe ration.m:573

Received error response that shouldn't apply to Mail: The request timed out. on EWS response <MFEWSSyncFolderItemsResponseMessageOperation: 0x6100002f1480> (EXECUTING)

...

Now that you mention it - YES.

This is absolutely ridiculous!

Being a macuser since the eighties I have never experinced anything computer related so frustrating as this.

Bought three new Mcbook and Airs to the office, Mavericks hangs mail and crashes them / locks the computers up.

The Exchange mail we have used with our macs for years just doesnt work no more.

GUYS THIS IS MY LIVING!

I´ve just bought the most expensive useless thing ever. I cant use my new 13´Air at work, I´ve spent hours to test all suggestions that is presented here, and after one night of reloading all mails it just screws up again. And again. And again...

The oldest threads here is several months old, and nothing seems to happen?

A very weird thing happened today. My Mail.app, just like for everyone else, stopped retreiveing Exchange emails since the day of Maverick update, i.e. I don't have any mails newer than October 25. All my attempts at suggestions on this thread didn't work, rebuilding, deleting and recreating the account etc. However, today I opened the Mail.app, and was surprised to watch how it fetched a few newer emails, up to November 11. But then it stopped fetching anything newer, and is idle now again...

no it did not fix my exchange issues. painfully slow retreival of mail - i am reduced to reading my mail on my iphone since it doesn't show up on my desktop. On Mavericks, using mail to (try) to read exchange server mail. A restart of the computer often forces Mail to update. otherwise the pace is glacial.

I have a clean install of mavericks. Now at 10.9.1, Mail 7.1 (1827)

2 exchange accounts

1 iCloud (originally @mac.com accounts)

1 GMail Account

I hear the new mail chime on my iPhone because Exchange has been flawless there since Day 1

New mail shows up in my inbox for exchange accounts after I click the Get Mail button. Changing the fetch interval from auto,1 min,5 min doesn't seem to alleviate the need of me having to go in and get my mail

Other notes - I move all my mail to icloud for archive purposes and my aim for a zero unread inbox. I'm sure all of our setups are unique but I'm just sharing my experience here so we can all command the knowledge of what's going on.

Also, my exchange accounts are hosted on office365 with microsoft themselves so I doubt they're having Exchange configuration issues but we'll see who ends up taking the wrap for this one.

I have an odd issue with my OSX Mavericks Mail and Exchange setup. Everything is (mostly) working. However, every so often I send a message and it does not go out. Then about 3-4 minutes later I receive a prompt from mail that the message was unable to be sent using the Exchange server. I then offers me a list of SMTP servers to choose from with the Exchange server highlighted. I then select Try with selected server (which was the original server that I was sending through) and it works fine. This seems to happen more with emails with attachments - perhaps timeout issue?