Exchange servers and Mavericks Mail

I agree with 'way too much i stuff' - be articulate and respectful. Clearly Apple are aware that this is a major issue since they are regularly editing the postings. There has already been a Mail update to address Gmail issues, so let's give Apple the benefit of the doubt. The engineering department has clearly been busy - judging from the very recent updates to Numbers, Pages and Keynote. And no I don't work for Apple!

Maybe there is a small team of software engineers working around the clock in a small room somewhere, but just haven't told the support team they are working on it.

For me, having spent several hours getting Boot Camp to work with Win 8.1 on late 2013 Macbook (another frustration but fortunately with a happy ending) I'm satisfied for the present. The lesson I would suggest Apple needs to learn from this is that good communication is a vital.

Is it just me, or is Mail just getting progressively worse every day this problem exists? On Mavericks release day the problem happened once or twice a day... then it started happening more times per day, eventually every 20 minutes.

Now I'm at the point where Mail doesn't function at all, even after quitting and reopening.

Seriously Apple... ***, I'm ready to just run on full boot camp at this point.

Arthur wrote - "For me Outlook for Mac 2011 does the job. I do like Apple Mail much better, but for now Outlook at least is a functioning alternative."

Thats a lot of bucks to spend on a workaround. They ought to fix what they broke. Office for Mac which we have has some wierd thing called Entourage. Will that work on Exchange?

I persuaded my son to upgrade to Mavericks on his office Mac and Macbook Pro, as my experience with Mavericks was great.

The difference being I use MS webmail, but he uses corporate MS Exchange.

He can't work effectively any more, and being self employed that's a big thing to happen to him. I feel guilty. Shoulda kept my big mouth shut.

Entourage is the old name for Outlook for Mac, it was used on the 2008 version of MS office for Mac. The 2011 version is simply called Outlook, but yes Entourage will work.

That said, both Entourage and Outlook 2011 aren't very good in my opinion.

My experience: syncing delay seems random and quite variable but not slowing further over time. I'm in the camp of those very comfortable with Mail and not wanting to use Outlook 11 though I have it also. I just keep my iPad beside my MBA to monitor inbound email. Entourage, BTW, was, in my humble view, a total POS and an entirely different application and code base to Windows Outlook. Outlook 11 is certainly a significant improvement and functionally similar to the last Windows version.

I'm astonished that Apple hasn't thought fit to communicate with us on what is a very serious issue affecting a larger population than even the significant number of message posters and viewers would suggest, I imagine, since this affects corporate users who rely on their iT staff to resolve such issues.

I am beginning to suspect that Apple has changed where its SW is being written. 😮

Quality in design and execution has suffered in the recent releases of Mavericks and ios7.

Certainly I also find Safari now ios7.0.x very cumbersome in design.

Apps have different keyboards showing... etc

Things are just not consistent anymore.

On Mavericks, to expect business users to wait over a month for a basic Mail fix for something as fundamental as Exchange access is frankly shocking 😟

Pnoble said

" I'm astonished that Apple hasn't thought fit to communicate with us on what is a very serious issue affecting a larger population than even the significant number of message posters and viewers would suggest, I imagine, since this affects corporate users who rely on their iT staff to resolve such issues."

The people this is affecting are, by and large, busy people in business.

People who (say) don't like the background color for the dock have more time to whinge about it such trivialities.

This IS a serious problem for Apple and its corporate customers and I hope they are addressing it seriously.

Synchronizing accounts (Mailbox menu item) seems to kick my Mail to retrieve from the server. I have used an Applescript which does this automatically every 5 mins (change the '5' after 'return' for a different time interval). If you want to try this ....

Open AppleScriptEditor (in Applications). Paste in this code and add account name(s).

on idle

tell application "Mail"

synchronizewithaccount "add account name here"

synchronize with account "add another account name here"

end tell

return 5 * 60

end idle

Then File > Export. Set file format to Application and tick the option 'Stay open after run handler'. Then double click the .app to start. Will keep going until you quit it.

Hope it helps.

yay - mine seems to have sorted it self out. A rebuild wasn't enough - I had to completely remove the account (now under 'internet accounts' in settings), also removed it from ~/Library/Mail/V2 and then added the account again under mail (and then wait a day and half for the synchronising to catch up). Checking interval was set back to 'automatic'.

Sp conditioned to the non-arriving email that I still get nervous if I don't see any new mail within 15 min or so.... sad.

i'm not having (yet?) the problems others are reporting with my new MacBook Pro using Apple Mail an Exchange but I have noticed one peculiarity someone might be able to explain. I use Apple mail on my desktop with OS X 10.8.5 and when I check the size of my mailboxes on the Exchange server vs that with Apple mail under Mavericks on the MacBook Pro, the MacBook Pro reports always two fewer messages, and yet a larger size by about 900KB. Always.

Does anyone have an explanation? Just a curiosity.

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)

(

0 MailCore 0x00007fff8cdcdc8c -[MCAssertionHandler _handleFailureWithPreamble:description:arguments:] + 141

1 MailCore 0x00007fff8cdcdafd -[MCAssertionHandler handleFailureInMethod:object:file:lineNumber:description:] + 215

2 Mail 0x00007fff92036a01 -[MFEWSResponseOperation handleResponseMessage:withObject:] + 834

3 Mail 0x00007fff9203cb60 -[MFEWSSyncFolderItemsResponseMessageOperation executeOperation] + 409

4 MailCore 0x00007fff8ce1ef0a -[MCMonitoredOperation main] + 211

5 Foundation 0x00007fff91a93591 -[__NSOperationInternal _start:] + 631

6 Foundation 0x00007fff91a9323b __NSOQSchedule_f + 64

7 libdispatch.dylib 0x00007fff89ee72ad _dispatch_client_callout + 8

8 libdispatch.dylib 0x00007fff89eeb7ff _dispatch_async_redirect_invoke + 154

9 libdispatch.dylib 0x00007fff89ee72ad _dispatch_client_callout + 8

10 libdispatch.dylib 0x00007fff89ee909e _dispatch_root_queue_drain + 326

11 libdispatch.dylib 0x00007fff89eea193 _dispatch_worker_thread2 + 40

12 libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x00007fff88c14ef8 _pthread_wqthread + 314

13 libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x00007fff88c17fb9 start_wqthread + 13

)

I'm not replying specifically to anyone, but wanted to share some tips we have for Outlook 2011 Exchange users.

The Inbox syncs more frequently than any other and should be kept as clean as possible. (this is the number one cause of problems with sync). Do NOT make subfolders under the Inbox.

Exchange Header

Inbox

Folder A <---this is wrong

Drafts

Deleted Items folder

Junk

Folder A <-- this is correct

It's best to move folders using your web interface (OWA). I suggest if you are moving LOTS of folders to delete the Exchange account in Mail and/or Outlook first. Make the changes in OWA then add account and let it download.

We have seen issues where a corrupt message will cause sync to fail at that point. If you know the message subject you can try deleting the message. Other users have found that using accents and symbols in folder names caused problems.

The following is specific for Outlook, but I suspect that Mail is similar.

Any folder with more than a few thousand messages is going to take some time to fully come down when you first sync your account. Due to the design of Outlook's sync engine (and how exchange works), you will see the 512 newest messages in a folder at the initial start of sync then the rest of the folder's contents will be back filled before you see any mail that arrives after this point. This is why it will look like you are not getting new mail when a folder is still going through initial sync. This is also further exacerbated by an Exchange issue where it gets unnecessary change events before the newer mail arrives. If you carefully watch the progress during the sync of a folder with greater than a couple thousand messages, you will see "Updating local..." a lot before the newer mail starts arriving (newer than the initial 512 that come down).

Outlook checks the server for updates every minute, any folder that has updates will subsequently be synced. Since Outlook has a limit on how many folders can be synced at a time, there can be a queue of folders waiting. The Inbox does get high priority so it will generally sync before other folders that also need to sync.

Recommended Mailbox Size Limits

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2005/03/14/395229.aspx

While Mail does not use the 2GB limit on exporting folders as .mbox file, Outlook does.

Sorry but what do you people think you are doing with your idle threats against Apple...it's funny to read what some of your write. I'm quite sure "chaz" is not the final word on Apple over this issue, you are just working with yet another tech support guy who's hands are tied by the inability to get the answers he wants.

I too am a big important IT admin and see no use in stomping my feet and threating a multi billion dollar company with my scarey social media tatics. Sad.

For the rest of you know-it-all who keep writing "I cannot believe they are ignoring us..." who says they are ignoring you? Just because you are not getting the instantanious answers you want doesn't mean Apple is not hard at work on this, and other issues.

carboncow wrote:

.... Just because you are not getting the instantanious answers you want doesn't mean Apple is not hard at work on this, and other issues.

It would be nice if they let the business users know they ARE working on it in a press release or by having someone from Apple post on the forum that they are paying for. Or a Tweet, something.

Keep stomping feet folks, (or at least keep it bumped up on page 1 of the forum) - we want this fixed in 10.9.1 or earlier. Business is suffering.

You have no idea what you are talking about. It's very apparent they are not working on a fix. They were very vocal about the issue with GMAIL and about getting that resolved. My technician Chazz was told by his higher ups that the problem was exchange related and that they were not working on any fix because from their standpoint it's working just fine.

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