Why won’t Mac’s Mail app. play with university exchange servers?
For many university students, adapting to Mr. Microsoft’s exchange server for sending and receiving mail has become a way of life.  What would be fantastic is if Mail app for OS X “just worked” with those confounded exchange servers; sadly, it isn’t quite that easy.For some reason, Microsoft-based exchange programs tend to allow OS X Mail to receive incoming mail, but not send outgoing; me, being the resourceful college student that I am, decided to consult my Frostburg State University computer help desk, as I was unable to come up with a solution.Let me tell you, do not think that all universities are fully staffed with Mac-savvy attendants, yet.  To be quite honest, the lady went through the same steps I did, and said she didn’t know; she recommended I just check my email via the web client.Unacceptable, frankly.  I shouldn’t have to check the web client; for most mail providers, OS X Mail “just works.”Most M$ supporters would say there is undoubtedly a problem with Mail app; the real answer is that, most obviously, we are still living in a Microsoft world.Here’s my duck taped-solution, and if anyone has any better ideas, please leave constructive comments:  I receive mail from the exchange server like normal in Mail app from my university, but also have my Gmail account linked to Mail, so I use Gmail for outgoing mail.It isn’t perfect, but it works.I’d love a sure-fire solution, but I haven’t been able to find one.  Update: my fellow writer Leslie Poston led me to a site that provides a fairly comprehensive fix, though I haven’t been able to wade through it yet.  Here’s the link; apparently part of the problem is an inconsistency with Office 2007 protocol.  Enjoy, and thanks Leslie!
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December 28th, 2007
Since Exchange is the existing commercial standard, the onus should be on Apple’s app to work with it. SMTP (send mail) is rightly locked down to keep infected zombie machines from staging spam-a-thons. That keeps your mail system from getting blacklisted, mail from your domain being refused, because it’s a know spam generator. I snuck a peek at the University website, looks like it’s an Active Directory setup. The AD schema has to be modified for OSX to authenticate properly. If the college has as many Macs as some of your articles indicate, an OSX server for authentication would be the easiest solution. It could get the IT staff into the OSX brotherhood as well. Divide and conquer.
June 26th, 2008
The link pointed by Triston is a great reference for configuring not only the Client side but also has a lot of information on configuring the server. Send it to all of your ITs. In Windows working environments IT people usually know nothing about Macs so is hard to get them understand why configuration must be made different to allow access to services. Thanks for this article and for the link!
February 3rd, 2009
Snow Leopard is the answer.
“…Support for connecting to Microsoft Exchange 2007 servers will be included in Address Book, Mail, and iCal…”
May 6th, 2009
What template are you running on this site ? I really like it. Could you post where you got it from ?
September 9th, 2009
What is the incoming mail server for Frostburg State University. Is the outgoing mail server the same, if not, what is it?