Exchange servers and Mavericks Mail

Hi,

just adding me to the list of the one that are seeing this issue as well.

I travel worldwide, working in training, support and consultancy, with extensive use of exchange emails with customers in private email lists, mostly adding attachments and these emails are stuck in my outbox. Sometimes they go out after a day, sometimes just like now nothing happens since two days. If there is an email with attachment stuck in my outbox, it is also blocking all my following emails: Stranded in Doha, support in US and UK is waiting for screenshots and log files, and nothing goes out. Will switch to Outlook and have to pay for this.

This is really ******* me off!!!

This happened sometimes before since mid of last year, but with Mavericks this really got worse!

thanks

-chris

Yes, this is my second MacBookPro 17", fully equipped. I have a lot of customers working with imac 27 or mac pros, and since we support both OS X and Windows 7 they often ask me which one I would recommend for performance reasons. I work in TV and Film business, and customers often have 50+ clients connected to shared stprage and database servers. I really see them moving to windows.

I also always had issues with my Macs. I have spent thousands of EUR, but after 2 years, the logic board dies, or after one year the power supply is broken.

I still own a Sony Vajo SR1K from 2000, it still works, even once I was falling on it. Only had to exchange the battery.

I am no longer convinced of Mac hardware and software, I must say... The fact that Apple did not say anything for months about the mail issue doesn't really make it better. No patches at all, just one update on Mavericks. This is not what I call support.

One of my customers is a competitor of apple, and they release patches and updates every few weeks!

I am really thinking about getting a new Laptop, no OS, and install ubuntu with virtual machines... Too bad there is no exchange support for linux, but to be true... is that in any way different to OS X???

thanks

-chris

" So much for the Land of the Free. Thank you Randy for at least trying."

The beta software Randy refers came with an NDA forbidding discussion of it outside the developer forums, Randy agreed to it and promptly broke the agreement. That's what caused the removal of the post.

Personally I have a distaste for those who can't keep their word, nothing to do with the land of the free, more to do with ethical behavior, or the lack thereof.

I have been using Macs in a post production, audio recording, and an office environment going on 20 years now. Currently I have 8 newer Macs of all flavors ranging from Mac Minis to Macbook Pros to Mac Pros sitting in cubicle at work with zero issues. Failures over the past 20 years out of hundreds, maybe thousands of systems I've setup or supported have been minimal. A few logic boards in Macbook Pros have died. And there were some issues with the G5 logic boards on the quad processor systems. Bad batches of harddrives had been the most common failure mode, but those aren't made by Apple and the same failures occured on Windows machines using the same models of drives. Compared to the Windows machines I've supported, Apple is no worse and mostly better in terms of reliability. And when I do run Windows, I prefer running that OS on Apple hardware.

We have clients with a wide range of issues with Mail.app and Exchange. It's a shame because Exchange Online, for example, is such a great and popular service these days.

One fairly reliable workaround for us has been to set the email account type as IMAP instead of Exchange. Most Exchange servers will support IMAP connections and you get broadly the same end result, full sync of email, with the odd exception like being unable to do out-of-office replies from the Mail client (so what - just set it in webmail). If this is a major problem, you go on holiday too much :-)

The IMAP server address for Office 365 / Exchange Online is outlook.office365.com and your username should be your full email address. Settings will vary for in-house Exchange servers of all the various flavours.

If Mail.app can't help but auto-detect that you're on Exchange when setting up the email account from scratch, try to click Cancel before it has the chance, then click Continue. This bypasses auto-detect and allows you to specify IMAP as the account type.

You'll need to reassign your signature to the new IMAP account, and probably disable / delete the old Exchange account before setting up the replacement to avoid conflicts.

Csound1 wrote:

" So much for the Land of the Free. Thank you Randy for at least trying."

The beta software Randy refers came with an NDA forbidding discussion of it outside the developer forums, Randy agreed to it and promptly broke the agreement. That's what caused the removal of the post.

Personally I have a distaste for those who can't keep their word, nothing to do with the land of the free, more to do with ethical behavior, or the lack thereof.

Yes point taken.

jimbo2k wrote:

One fairly reliable workaround for us has been to set the email account type as IMAP instead of Exchange...

Thanks for the advise, but our mail server does not have imap activated. I was told imap is pretty much shut down by Microsoft in 2010 R2.

So no real help...

Cuttergott wrote:

Thanks for the advise, but our mail server does not have imap activated. I was told imap is pretty much shut down by Microsoft in 2010 R2.

It may be deactivated by default, but I am certain you can enable IMAP service on all Exchange email servers. Sounds like the kind of thing I might consider saying if I was looking after your server and either didn't know how to do it, or couldn't be bothered :-)

Exchange Online has an Exchange 2013 back-end I believe, and IMAP seems to work very well indeed as far as Mail.app is concerned.

Indeed a quick Google search throws up this beauty, explicitly detailing how to set up IMAP service on Exchange 2010 R2. I can't vouch for the quality of the IMAP server, maybe it's a pile of wotsit, but there it is:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124489(v=exchg.141).aspx

Switching users to IMAP has saved my company hours and hours and hours of clients phoning up and saying "uh, my email got stuck in the Outbox and now I have 26 backed up in the queue" or "I haven't had any email for 6 hours, whyyy". All Exchange problems.

Yes, the Exchange config should work. But IMAP works better right now. It's been the same through 10.7-10.9 from what I can remember.

@Foil Man

Great recommendation from you Foil Man for the late arrival of e-mails. Many thanks.

I did as you recommended:

- go into the Keychain App: remoce all passwords related to e-mails: accounts, servers etc... (keeping those passwords elsewhere.

- restart Mail: the app requests the password and....mails which have not arrived over the last three days on my MacBook Pro with Maverick/Mail (but had arrived on my iphone and iPad...) started to flow in....relief....

I made a test: sent an e-mail to myself and...it arrived within the minute.

Hope this will last....

Thank you Foil Man: others: try this.

Apple mavericks: anyclue why Maverick has scrambled Mail with passwords in Keychain???

For the situation which happenned when I "upgraded" to Mavericks ( not sure the terminology is right here): empty e-mail folders: I did what someone else recommended: click on each folder and subfolder and select rebuid:

historical mails are immediately downloaded an now sync.

jimbo2k wrote:

It may be deactivated by default, but I am certain you can enable IMAP service on all Exchange email servers. Sounds like the kind of thing I might consider saying if I was looking after your server and either didn't know how to do it, or couldn't be bothered :-)

Okay, thanks...

But I won't be changing the exchange server settings of a 3000 employees company, let alone would I never have access to the servers, no matter if they are in the US or anywhere else. This is a company rule, and I am not an administrator. So I will have to live with it the way it is, which will move me away from mail...

Seems to be a problem on my side... but thanks for the advise, this might help others.

thanks

-chris

I think, moving away from MAIL is an overreaction, since we know Apple is working on the issue.

I got the email bounce back issue when my mail got an attachment in a 2500 employees company. So no way to call the IT and said my mac got an issue with exchange.

In Mail, I have flag, folder, VIP person and some smart folders, so I live with the issue, since I know Apple will provide a fix within a month or two.

So if you were in business and you got most of your legal documents and business requests by emails several hours or up to a day late, like a family member of mine did, would you still wait til they release a fix? He couldn't.

Well, the fact that this issue is known since more than half a year, plus the time it takes until we get a fix is just way to long.

For me this was really interrupting my business, causing delayed communication, and also caused financial impact. So I should have moved away way ago, but it is just now that I realize that the issue is not me or my Mac or the server...

So the last thing I would do is calling this an overreaction.

If mail is just used for private purpose, then I would wait. But anyways, now I understand why most mac users I know use Outlook, but this also is mostly because of company rules.

thanks

-chris

I agree with you, I don't have the same issue than you. For me it's just a bounce back email and when I click again the email is finally going out. I do not have any delay in message delivery.

It's very weird that you don't have the same issue. Maybe your problem come from another source. Try another software to see if you have the same problem or not.

For me, I can continue to work like this, it's just annoying,and I can't wait to get the fix.

I don't know why but suddenly today, people receiving twice my email.

But I don't want to quit MAIL and redo all my organisation for a couple month of annoying bounce back.

Cuttergot, the issue might be your Exchange server. Though, I acknowledge that Mail is definitely broken when used with Exchange. Apple is close to a fix, but it not yet fully fixed.

Temporarily switch to IMAP and you'll be fine. IMAP works perfectly with Exchange servers. The only thing you wont be able to do is set your Out of Office.