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blackbones · Aug 10, 2006, 05:14 PM

Hey all. I work in a small office, only 25 people. All email runs off of an exchange server. Currently i'm using entourage but would love to use mac mail, entourage is amazingly slow, get beach ball all the time (i access the office mail as well as 2 other imap accounts).

Our IT guy refuses to help out, and for the life of me i cant figure out how to configure mac mail to read off of the exchange server. It will work very intermitently and randomly. I can see my inbox but as soon as i click over to see my sent box everything disappears and the "checking inbox" pie comes up and stays up.

Any help would be much appreciated.

generationfourt · Aug 10, 2006, 09:46 PM

what is it with IT and mac mail? I went through the same thing. I just finally got it set up after they finally believed that mac mail comes with OSX.

Honestly do what I did, keep bugging them. Call them for a different problem and keep bringing it up.

jguidroz · Aug 11, 2006, 04:34 PM

I always used Mail.app to access an Exchange server at my old job. That is, Microsoft released service pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2004. That update finally allowed me to get Entourage working. I would have much preferred using Mail.app, but Entourage provided a better user experience.

Now as for as getting Mail.app working, you should be able to setup an exchange account. You'll need to use the OWA address of your Exchange server in order for this to work.

Gossamer · Aug 11, 2006, 04:42 PM

Originally Posted by jguidroz

Now as for as getting Mail.app working, you should be able to setup an exchange account. You'll need to use the OWA address of your Exchange server in order for this to work.

How would I find this address? I do IT here at ISU and we're switching users over to Entourage, but I'd still like to use Mail.app to check my mail. I know the exchange server's address from within Entourage, but Mail asks for not only the OWA server, but also Incoming and Outgoing mail servers. What do I put for those?

El Gato · 05:50 PM

Mail, I believe, treats Exchange like an IMAP server, and uses the OWA connection to filter out meeting requests and other stuff. So, you need to have OWA as well as IMAP enabled on the Exchange server, using the IMAP settings for your incoming and outgoing servers.

This has been the problem in my office, getting the IT guy to enable IMAP. Supposedly, it's not that difficult to do, but he hasn't gotten around to it yet. Luckily, we have all of our mail pass through an external server first to catch spam, so I just use that as my outgoing server and have Exchange redirect any incoming mail to my Gmail. It's ghetto, but it works.

mindwaves · Sep 1, 2006, 11:36 AM

Yeah, that is what I did also. I setup an Exchange account and I had to input an outgoing mail server and I just used the same settings as an IMAP account since it was enabled. So does that means Mail is not really an Exchange client, but rather a pseudo-client?

mindwaves · Sep 4, 2006, 06:46 PM

Enabling an Exchange account in Mail takes up an insane amount of CPU.....

El Gato · Sep 4, 2006, 07:20 PM

Originally Posted by mindwaves

Yeah, that is what I did also. I setup an Exchange account and I had to input an outgoing mail server and I just used the same settings as an IMAP account since it was enabled. So does that means Mail is not really an Exchange client, but rather a pseudo-client?

That's my understanding of it. Microsoft, to no surprise, uses it's own protocol for Exchange called MAPI. From what I've read, the only true MAPI clients on the Mac side of things are a version of Outlook that runs under OS 9 and, to some extent, Entourage.

I certainly hope that Jobs has some better Mail-Exchange integration up his sleeve for Leopard.

Momma · Jun 8, 2007, 05:46 AM

Hi All,

I will be working from home soon, but i need access to two email accounts, my personal account and an artwork account, i have been told by out IT department that i will have to check both by logging into our internal server via webmail, as they don't allow any external email clients because it means leaving a port open, which is a security risk. Is there any way around this? I'm thinking of something like a notifier that can let me know when there is new email, i need some way of being notified, instead of logging on to two separate email accounts every 5 minutes, the IT guys say that because of cookies and open sessions, its best it i open my personal mail in say safari and leave it open, and then the artwork email in firefox and leave that open all day, and just refresh when i check for new mail? Surely there must be another way around it? The company uses Microsoft Exchange Server and i have to log into the Microsoft Office Outlook Web access page to view emails.

Two questions...

1) Is there any way i can use an email client such as mail.app or entourage etc if the IT company blocks all ports? Can i not use the port that i access the webmail on?

2) Will any of these plugins work with Microsoft Exchange web mail? Or do you know any alternatives?

Any help is much appreciated

Cheers

besson3c · Jun 8, 2007, 09:32 AM

Originally Posted by Gossamer

How would I find this address? I do IT here at ISU and we're switching users over to Entourage, but I'd still like to use Mail.app to check my mail. I know the exchange server's address from within Entourage, but Mail asks for not only the OWA server, but also Incoming and Outgoing mail servers. What do I put for those?

Just to avoid some confusion here...

The Exchange server has an option to enable IMAP sessions. With IMAP enabled, you can access your Exchange mailbox like any other IMAP client.

All non Outlook clients (including Entourage) do not speak the native MS Groupware native protocol MAPI, and instead use Outlook Web Access and WebDAV, requiring for this service to be enabled.

I would try accessing something like: www.exchangeserver.isu.edu and see if you can figure out the web access server. Surely there must be some documentation somewhere offered by your campus to use Outlook Web Access, if this service is offered?

besson3c · Jun 8, 2007, 09:34 AM

Originally Posted by El Gato

That's my understanding of it. Microsoft, to no surprise, uses it's own protocol for Exchange called MAPI. From what I've read, the only true MAPI clients on the Mac side of things are a version of Outlook that runs under OS 9 and, to some extent, Entourage.

I certainly hope that Jobs has some better Mail-Exchange integration up his sleeve for Leopard.

Right... Entourage in the last Office version for OS 9 spoke native MAPI, all versions of Entourage for OS X speak WebDAV and communicate directly with the Web Access server over HTTP.