Is my Exchange host lying?

[watoosi]

I have a user with a 7290, an XP PC with Outlook 2003 and a Mac running Entourage 2004 on OS10.4. He uses a BES 4.0 server to sync his exchange mailbox data with BB.

Problem is that when he makes a change (e.g. deleted an email) from the Entourage client, it does not delete the message from the BB. The change is made on the Outlook client and the OWA interface.

The offsite exchange hosting company (USA.NET) says that it's a problem with Entourage stripping the I.D. from the message and the BES not being able to reconcile. This doesn't make sense to me; sounds like a configuration problem. Anybody have experience with this?

[jdh]

I'm having the exact same problem here. I have my own Exchange 2003 Server and BES 4.0 SP2 server. I've been running with no problems whatsoever, even with multiple Outlook clients.

However, I was playing with Entourage today, and am seeing the same behaviour. Messages filed or deleted from Entourage are not being processed by the BES in any way (filed messages don't end up in their correct folders either).

On the other hand, as always, messages deleted or filed from my Outlook or OWA clients are reflected on the Blackberry with no problems.

The ID stripping sounds like a possibility. I certainly don't see any configuration options that could be used to change this behaviour, at least not on the server side.

If Entourage is in fact doing this, I would suggest that it's a bug that Microsoft will hopefully address and fix in a future service pack.

I'd be very interested if anybody else has any ideas on how to fix this, as it's a rather annoying situation that is going to prevent me from being able to do any real message management on my Mac.

[jdh]

Just as a follow-up to the above, Microsoft released SP2 for Office 2004 for Mac, which adds a number of enhancements to the Entourage/Exchange integration, but most importantly (for me anyway), it seems to have fixed the issue with deleted and filed items not being properly reconciled on the Blackberry.

There's a small back-end update for Exchange that they recommend for enabling read/write access to shared calendars, but I did not need to apply that... Only SP2 on the Mac was required.