Make Outlook Web Access work with Mail for Mac OS?

Question

Is it possible to configure web access to work with Mail for Mac, either directly, or through a proxy gmail account? My school uses an outlook based system. Setting up on iOS is a breeze, but for some reason, I can't get it to work on Mail for OS X Lion.

Edit:

Here's the instructions (PDF) for iOS setup. How would this translate to Mail on Mac OS 10.7 Lion?

Solution 1

To everyone else reading this... I have worked for about an hour with Moshe on this, we got around it by cheating and just using his universities IMAP server instead. It looks like his university uses an expired SSL certificate which despite forcing trust on it, it just isn't working.

To answer your question, I first need to say it isn't possible to connect mail to OWA (well, old versions used it for public folders, but, that's another story). What you want to do is connect mail to Exchange.

Outlook Web Access is just the name for the Exchange web interface, and, you do not connect applications to it.

If you easily set it up on iOS, this was most likely down to choosing Exchange as the server type.

The latest version of OSX's Mail does have support for Microsoft Exchange 2010 now, and I am unsure as to why you are having problems.

All I can suggest is that you make sure your server type is set to Exchange and you set the settings correctly.

Just Googled for a picture, please again, double check that you did set the Exchange mode, it should look something like this:

Solution 2

The reason this doesn't work natively (most likely) is that the university is still using an older version of Exchange. Apple Mail and consequently the new version of Outlook for Mac will only connect to an Exchange server running EWS(Exchange Web Services). This is a drastic change from the older OWA style present in the 2003 variants of Exchange. What I do to circumvent this limitation is use a mail proxy. The one I use is DavMail http://davmail.sourceforge.net/. Essentially DavMail works as a broker between the Exchange server and your client. You can also set it to disregard validation of certificates enabling you to get around your certificate issue. You will simply connect to DavMail (localhost) using IMAP and SMTP and then DavMail will broker the connection to server. This also gives you native access to your Calendaring and Contacts on Exchange.

Hope this helps.

Comments

[Simon Hughes]

Mail changed between 10.6 and 10.7 I don't see Exchange 2007 as an option anywhere I assume you mean Exchange IMAP.

[William Hilsum]

Exchange IMAP is actually just a slightly modified version of IMAP that Mail uses to add features over regular IMAP... Do they not have any other Exchange options as you actually want the Exchange protocol.

[William Hilsum]

@Moshe Try Choosing Exchange!

[Simon Hughes]

Can we please move this to a chat room? chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/118/root-access

[William Hilsum]

@Moshe - I'm nearly always there!

[William Hilsum]

@Moshe - Already was! Just finished and it is at the top! No need to mark as accepted - wait until you hear back from the IT department and see if they can do anything... IMAP is sort of cheating / working around the problem - it will be much better for you if you get FULL Exchange working.

[Simon Hughes]

Well, in the meanwhile, have an upvote. ;-)