[Tom Holt]

Hi

This week a few of my colleagues have been experiencing problems with the Mail and Calendar apps on their iPhones and iPads.

We run an MS Exchange server for email and calendars on a Windows 2003 server. Up until the beginning of this week, everything has been working fine. iPhones and iPads were syncing Calendar entries and Mail items within the respective apps as you'd expect them to. However, at the beginning of this week, 2 devices (iPhone 4 and iPad 1st generation - each with the most up to date iOS - 5.1.1) have stopped receiving new mail on these MS Exchange accounts. It's constantly displaying 'Checking for Mail' on the status bar at the bottom.

What makes the problem somewhat confusing is that my own iPhone (again, a 4 with iOS 5.1.1) and my iPad (this time a 3rd generation) are working absolutely fine with the same Exchange server, albeit my own account rather than those of my colleagues. It's receiving mail and syncing calendar entries as if nothing has changed.

We've tried various reboots of the server and turned the iPhone off and on again. We've even completely reset the iPhone (and restored the backup from iTunes), but it still won't update any mail in the app and comes up with the same message as before. Erasing the account from the phone and re-entering the details from scratch presents the same problem. We haven't tried doing any of the above on the iPad since, we're pretty certain that there's something up outside of the device itself.

Does anyone have any knowledge of MS Exchange server's relationship with iOS's Mail app to be able to identify the problem? We're only a small company, so don't really have an IT department that could help us... Our external IT consultant was even stumped when we mentioned that some iOS devices are working fine, when these aren't!

Looking forward to hearing some of your opinions/solutions. If there's anything else you'd like to know, ask away!