Have you ever set up a new Microsoft Exchange server and then found that users’ iPhones showed they had mail (who it’s from, to, subject, date, and a few characters of the body text), but trying to actually open and read the message resulted in the following error?
This message has not been downloaded from the server.
Searching the web yields suggestions that all pretty much circle back to one of the same 3 or 4 ideas – none of which applied to me/helped me:
- Remove spaces from the names of your Exchange server’s “accepted domains.”
- Change the default accepted domain to a different one and then change it right back again.
- A hosted spam company that routes your mail could be tweaking your mail’s headers in a confusing way.
…and then there are all the generic things for a per-case basis, like: you may have a poor connection or a bug in your iPhone, so try rebooting the phone and move into an area with stronger signal strength. Make sure your iOS is up to date, etc.
None of that worked for/applied to me, and I was banging my head against the wall until I remembered that Windows Update on the server doesn’t provide updates for Microsoft Exchange, even if you check the box telling it to also download updates for other Microsoft products! I was running a copy of Exchange 2013 that I had just downloaded as an ISO days before, so it seemed reasonable to expect it to be current, right? It even had the latest service pack (SP1), so it looked pretty current…. BUT WAIT!
Checking Microsoft’s site on a page called “Exchange Server Updates: build numbers and release dates” showed me that there had been 8 Cumulative Updates (“CU”) released for Exchange 2013 (so CU8 was the current one at the time – as of this writing they’re now up to CU9). That meant my Exchange Server 2013 with SP1 was over a year old, even though I had just downloaded the ISO, and had all the latest Windows/Microsoft Updates! Sure enough, once I installed CU8 (a massive 1.6GB download, requiring ~30 minutes of downtime for installation), iPhones started working normally again, and nobody complained anymore about the message not being downloaded from the server error. I knew it had to be something simple, since it was a fresh installation and straight-forward email migration in a small office, but it’s funny how easily you can forget about things like this!
Also, FYI, I heard later that this problem can also potentially be fixed by setting the default accepted domain to the DOMAIN.local domain. I can’t say for sure if that’s true, but I know someone who claims this worked for them.
The moral to the story is, don’t forget to go out of your way to manually check Microsoft’s Exchange Server Updates page from time to time to make sure you’re running the latest stuff! Otherwise, you may be killing yourself to find a fix that can be easily fixed by a patch!