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Updates and Solutions

  Troubleshooting ActiveSync - Outlook Email 0 Items
      Thursday, January 22, 2009

Last week I worked on a problem for a client who had an interesting situation. He was using ActiveSync on his Exchange 2003 server, and it had been working perfectly until it didn't work perfectly. But the symptoms of the failure were very strange: there was only one--after an initial synchronization completed, all his local PDA Outlook folders were still empty. On a device that already had content synced to it, no new content would ever arrive.

I had him set me up a test account and put some mail in it, and I synced it to my Treo 700w. When hit "sync", I actually watched it checking for changes. At the bottom of the screen, ran through each step: Contacts, Calendar, Email and Tasks. I watched it sync 10 different Inbox items, but when the sync completed, the inbox was empty and the display said "Outlook Email 0 Items".

If I decided to send an email from the phone, that worked fine.

Running the test from TestExchangeConnectivity.com showed that everything was working, green the whole way.

I even removed all the Exchange virtual directories in IIS and allowed them to regenerate, but nothing changed in the behavior. For all practical purposes everything was working, but the devices (both real and emulated) didn't actually get any email.

SOLUTION:

Eventually we chose to uninstall Trend Messaging Security (we'd already disabled it to no avail), and immediately synchronization worked properly. I've also read about this happening with other mail-focused security applications like Symantec and Avast, so definitely keep this handy as a solution for this problem.
 
Comments:
Hi David,

I came to you after watching some of the Trainsignal for Exchange 2007 videos - great stuff by the way, you have talent for teaching, plain english and very good examples, that was one of the best video courses I've ever watched.
I even more like your website and blog now. Anyway, to the point.

I am experiencing another weird issue with Active Sync. I have Palm Treo Pro and ActiveSync is scheduled to the option "As item arrives" so in theory everytime I get new mail it should pick it and appear on my phone. However this is not a case. Sometimes I am getting it straight away, but most likely it's full day and I'm getting no emails at all. However - they keep coming in as I can pick them on my standard desktop's Outlook or through OWA - not a problem. And now, when I force Active Sync on Palm to synchronize manually it would do the job, bang, 15 new emails on my palm appear.

Why is that then it does not work automatically (As item arrive)?

To make it even more confusing, sometimes it works, but most times it doesn't and I have to press manual synchronization on my Palm.

Any ideas appreciated :-)
Keep up great job, looking forward to see more new training videos from you, would love to see something in depth on DNS or Sharepoint.
 
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