I installed Mountain Lion yesterday because I’m an Apple early-adopter*. Unfortunately what comes with being an early adopter is that you have to sometimes scramble to find solutions last-minute because you just got “Appled”. This time it’s for the new version of Apple Mail that comes with Mountain Lion OS 10.8 that was released yesterday, July 26th. Bad kitty.

There are a lot of nice features that blur the line between iOS and Mac OS. Safari 6 is much faster and overall I am very pleased. This Mail bug however caused me to default to one of my clients Exchange OWA (web mail) and that was not fun.

Mail automatically changes the internal server value to something that your computer can not actually find. From what I’ve read this has something to do with how the Exchange server is configured at the source and what it pushes down to end-users.

The support community has been very active in the last 24 hours about this. I responded to this one in the Apple Support Community.

I was able to get my Mail to connect to the Exchange Server by changing my hosts file. The goal is to get your computer to look for the new server value at the IP of your mail server. This is a relatively advanced step and requires admin access to your computer. I’m sorry on many level if you work in an office that does not give you admin access to your computer (but that’s a different rant about Enterprise IT that I will save for later). But if you don’t have admin access you won’t have this problem anyways because you would have never been able to install 10.8.

These steps work as of today. Considering how many people are impacted by this I expect an update to be pushed by Apple soon.

The Steps to Recover Your Exchange Connection

For this I’ll refer to my email server as mail2.agency.com and the value that Mail 6.0 changed it to is exch2007.agency.local

I used vi from the command line as root but there are other ways.  You can disable root after this excesise is completed. I’ve provided an image below that shows what my account information looks like. You will need to know how to use VI for my example below.

Adding the IP address for the Mail 6.0 internal value:

1. Go to Terminal
2. nslookup of of mail2.agency.com gives you the IP of your email server
3. vi /etc/hosts (you have to enable root so you can save the file — follow the steps below)
4. Insert a new line that looks is the IP addressexch2007.agency.local
5. Save the file and reboot
6. Once you have restarted go back to Mail and wait for it to do it’s thing. I had to force quit mail and restart and I don’t exactly know why but I am up and running now.
7. You Mail account information should not have changed and should look like the image provided below.

What your Mail account information would look like:

Enabling Root in Mountain Lion:

 From the Apple menu choose System Preferences….

1. From the View menu choose Users & Groups.
2. Click the lock and authenticate as an administrator account.
3. Click Login Options….
4. Click the “Edit…” or “Join…” button at the bottom right.
5. Click the “Open Directory Utility…” button.
6. Click the lock in the Directory Utility window.
7. Enter an administrator account name and password, then click OK.
8. Choose Enable Root User from the Edit menu.
9. Enter the root password you wish to use in both the Password and Verify fields, then click OK.