Exchange servers and Mavericks Mail

az_broker wrote:

There was an update for Mavericks released today. If it does not show up in your normal software update, You can go to the app store and search 10.9.1. It will bring up the update and can be downloaded from there. I installed it and it does have a great deal to do with Mac Mail. It also "rebuilt" my inbox to "make it more efficient" I cannot yet confirm if it corrects the hangging emails with exchange but hope it does...

How big is the update? I am on limited allowance and they never tell you till it starts.

Exchange emails with attachments are still getting "hung up"...this update did nothing it seems for this particular email issue...how a bug this huge got through the Mavericks beta-testing process is incomprehensible. Extremely annoying problem...

I am chatting with a Support member and this is what I got back:
"Yes I have been hearing about the issue for a while and we have been told that there was an update in the works to resolve the issue and just like you we found out the this one wasn’t it. I do apologize for this inconvenience Roland. All we have been able to do is advise to use the options of outgoing servers that are given to you to be able to use the Mail app as you need to until the update has been issues that resolves this issue. I will however research to see if there may be another work around that I may not yet be aware of.

Okay I found updates for the servers that should take care of the duplicate mail issue.

Yes, it says to use imap servers. Are you already using IMAP servers?"

Anybody any success with setting up Exchange with IMAP and not have this issue?

Yes - IMAP access to an exchange server works fine for me.

However, you are dependent on whoever manages your exchange server to configure it to accept IMAP connections. I am told that IMAP on my exchange server will be switched off in the new year and only EWS access will be authorized - so this is not a solution for a mail client that is supposed to support exchange.

Saw on another Discussion page that the Signature could be the issue if you use images... I am not using images but do use a preset Signature...

I hope to get the IMAP settings for Exchange today and see if that works...

Hello people,

I have had a problem, with intermittent message send failure, and on hitting retry it would go. Finally figured out what was causing it today, but why it was happening I don't know.

I finally twigged failure to connect would only happen on emails where I had a signature attached. The signature had two small PDF images in it. I tested this a couple of times and was definetly the signature causing it!

I have created a new signature, with exactly the same format and images, voila!! no more failures.

Do not know why it was failing, it has worked with the same sig for the last 2 years!

Anyway, if you have a signature attached normally, and are having intermittent message send failure, try without sig and if this works create a new signature!

Good luck!!

BTW it might not have been the images that caused it, but the sig itself somehow corrupted.

As said if having message sending problem, that clears when "retry", see if it is the sig that has been carried over from prev version of OSX/Mail.app.

I posted yesterday that the update didn't do anything for me.

However, today, I opened the Mail app again, and after about 10 minutes, it fetched all the emails since Mavericks update, so became fully syncronized with the server. For the past few hours since then Mail app is receiving new messages. Fingers crossed, I don't know if this will last...

One thing I did notice after applying the update is that my "Sent" mail folder came back. It disappared after the last time I tried to rebuild my exchange account from scratch. I'm running Outlook 2011 concurrently to see how Mail behaves in comparision...

Hi Peter,

i realise signature solution won't help with receiving mails, but it was suggested that i post here the solution to sending issue i was lucky enough to find that helped me.

It definately has cleared up my issue, which i have been trying to solve for weeks!!

Now to fix a problem on my old man's, have transferred him to a new iMac and can't connect to his work mail server, in mail.app or browser webmail, erk!

Think it is a bad security cert somewhere.

Folks,

I haven't read all the recent updates, but I'm very aware of what the core issue is here. I just wanted to share some real informaton that kind of solved my problem in a way, but doesn't even remotely solve the actual BUG that is in Mail.

As stated in other posts, the problem is related related to either corrupt messsages (or at least "corrupt" in Apple Mail's view), special characters, or some other issue that causes the maibox sync to essentially hang on 1 message. Which may or may not resolve itself, and typically required a full quit of Mail and reopen.

One thing I did about 2 weeks ago was move ALL of my subfolders that were under the Inbox folder to the root of my mailbox (using OWA, not mail!!). As soon as I did that I no longer had any sync issues, in fact I found it extremly annoying because I COULD NOT even reproduce the issue anymore. My understanding is that Mail only actively syncs the Inbox folder, and subfolders, and I think all other folderrs are only refreshed when selected (I could be slightly wrong about this). What this tells me is that some type of message in my inbox subfolders was causing Mail to hang on sync. The even more annoying part is, I tried to move all the subfolders back under the Inbox, and I still couldn't repoduce the issue.

In summary, I moved all the subfolders from under my inbox to the mailbox root, then back, and I haven't had ANY issues with Mail since doing that. Also, I have 2 Exchange account in Mail, both with had this issue and both are resolved after doing this.

While this makes Mail more usable for me now, I am 100% certain that there is still a problem/bug with Apple Mail. This also kind of explains why the Apple engineers can't really get to the root of the problem, because it's so hard to reproduce.

PS, if you want to look at the raw EWS http traffic from Mail, you can launch Mail using this command, which will save MailConnectionLog.txt on the desktop. You can clearly see the problem when examining these logs.

/Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail -LogHTTPActivity YES -LogMaximumBytes 512 >& ~/Desktop/MailConnectionLog.txt &

I'm not sure I can agree with your conclussion. I have zero user created subfolders in my exchange account and still have the issue. The only folders I have beyond my mail root are the Apple created folders such as "Apple To Do," "Deleted Messages" (which is empty)," "Sent Messages" (also empty since those live in the other "Sent" mailbox), "Trash" (also empy since those messages live under the "Trash" mailbox, and the "RSS Feeds" which live under the seperate Exchange account heading.

And this reminds me, why the heck are there unused duplicate folders in different areas of Mail for the same accounts?? It's mind boggling. Exchange obviously makes it own heiarchy of directories. Apple seems to add their own on top of it which just make for more confusion. There's even some of this with their own iCould/MobileMe/.Mac accouts I have as well.

Do you have a large number of messages in your regular inbox? Also, you shouldn't have duplicate folders folders like that... Apple Mail automatically assigns your Exchange folders to the primary Sent, Drafts, Trash (Deleted Items) folders when you add the account. Do you have "store messages on sever" selected for sent, drafts and trash? You should.

I'm not sure how it's possible for you to have it set up that way with Exchange & Mail. With IMAP it's a different story, and you have to manually "assign" IMAP folders to the special system folders (sent, drafts, deleted/trash, etc).

I have the same problem and I have found that quitting and relaunching Mail does the trick.

I am thinking of switching back to Entourage simply because this is kind of annoying. I actually used to use Entourage, which I liked a lot because the Address Book, Calendar and email were nicely integrated. However, when offered the opportunity to have nicer intergration with my iPhone, I made the switch. Apple is oddly enough lagging Microsoft in this area. Having the Address Book separate from the email app doesn't make much sense to me.

Could you translate that into a simple instruction set for those of us less technically savvy? What is OWA, for example? I am certain I have the same problem and I can see you have fixed it, but I can't see how you did it.