Outlook 2011 For Mac – Email Downloading Never Completes / Blank Inbox / exchange 2007

We recently had a problem with a clients Mac Book / Outlook 2011 / Microsoft Exchange / Server 2008.

Since the internet cut of at their main office outlook 2011 and mac mail both were acting strangely. Outlook 2011 would say Downloading 1/7000 items, it would complete but the inbox would be completely blank and the process would start again. Mac Mail would download a few emails from a previous year but just randomly stop and no more emails would download.

After many many work hours. We finally Cracked it!

On the exchange server.

1. Click Start, click All Programs, click Accessories, right click Command Prompt and click Run As Administrator.
2. Change Directory to <root drive>\Windows\System32, the root drive is typically C:.  Run the following command
   lodctr /R
   This will restore the base or core counters
3. Check the registry value under HKLM/Software/Microsoft/WindowsNT/CurrentVersion/Perflib/009 and ensure that the value Counter is no longer corrupted.
4. In the Command Prompt window, run the following command:
   wmiadap /f
   This will force the reload of all counters in to the WMI repository.
5. Open Performance Monitor (perfmon.exe) and click the green + to Add, this will open Add Counters. Verify that the MSExchange counters exist and have Instances populated.
6. Restart the Microsoft Exchange Server computer.

NOTE: We didn’t have to restart the Exchange Server.
NOTE: You may need to recreate the identity on the mac see here. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2360509
NOTE: Original Fix Link. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2264110

 

This job was a real head scratcher!

 

We popped in the details of the exchange account to a Windows 7 Pro machine and it was fine – this ruled out the server.

We re-created identities on the mac, we installed every email client under the sun for mac including entourage, mac mail, thunderbird all with different but similar problems – it had to be the mac!

We re-installed outlook 2011, we deleted every single text file, document  and folder to do with Microsoft and Office on the mac!? In the end we created a virtual machine with Mac OSX on so we could break it as much as we wanted and revert the changes – just so we didn’t have to break the clients mac book completely. When we created the virtual machine with a fresh installation of Mac OSX, it had the same problem – it had to be the server!

This went on for nearly 2 weeks! Hours spent crawling forums and Googling. Every bit of spare time throughout the work day was back on this with trial and error.

I still cant believe that a performance monitor can stop email going to blackberry and mac devices!?

Anyway hope this blog saves you all the hours i spent on it.

All the Best.