Kevin C. Wong

Apple Mail + Microsoft Exchange [-]

My company recently switched to Microsoft Exchange. There is a native macOS client but I'm already using Apple Mail and Calendar and, although our corporate instructions said this does not work well, I decided to keep using my setup switching the backend.

Setup is really simple: go to System Preferences > Internet Accounts and add Exchange. You provide your corporate email address and password and it should login and start working, which for the most part it does.

Apple Calendar integration seems to work fairly well. I use the Exchange web client to create appointments if I need to (which I seldom do and that's why I've never used Apple Calendar itself to create them). You get an email for each event invite and when you accept in Calendar the email goes to the Trash.

Apple Mail integration is less stellar. It could be because I log into and out of VPN a lot so the network connection is not the most stable, but frequently an email only has header info and no contents. The only way I've gotten Apple Mail to reload the email is to go to Exchange web client and move the email out of Inbox and back into Inbox.

The other difficulty is that emails are not deleted on Exchange Server. When I move an email out of Inbox in Apple Mail it's out as far as I can tell, until I go to Exchange web client and see the Inbox has all the emails so far. So then I have to periodically go to Exchange web client to delete all those emails (itself not an easy process because there is no select all emails option).

I guess otherwise Apple Mail works ok. Compared to a simple POP3 or IMAP server though, MS Exchange Server integration is rather crappy and when you can't be better than the ground level competition that is disappointing.