iPhone Exchange 2007 Email Sync Issue

Last night I had trouble getting email from my iPhone.  It kept on reporting that it couldn’t communicate to the server.  I thought it was a server issue, so I left it overnight, but this morning it was exhibiting same symptoms.  We use Exchange 2007.  I proceeded with a few sanity checks.

  • The email on my desktop function normally.
  • The email via Outlook Web function normally.

With the above two checked, I knew that I was using the correct server and my login credentials were correct.

I’m using iOS 4.2.1 on an iPhone 4, so I started to Google for some answers, and came across this post.

After backing up my iPhone, I fully reset the phone and erase all contents and data on it.  I then register the phone with iTunes as a brand new phone.  Before I sync anything to it, I checked my Exchange connectivity, and everything was back! I follow this step with a restore from the previous backup, and the Exchange account did not work again.  Therefore, I repeated the fully reset, but this time I skip the restore and setup everything manually again.

Note that just a full reset and restore will not work.  Neither does deleting the account and reset the account.  I also tried changing my account’s password, and that also had no effect.  Another symptom to be aware of is that while trying to setup the Exchange account again, the phone was unable to verify the account. From all of this, I concluded that the registration as a new phone was a critical and necessary step.  I don’t know what the root cause was, but it sure was a pain.  It literally started to happen. For a guy who travels a lot, I’m glad this didn’t happen while I was in transit.

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