Windows Phone 8 : Accessing Email Settings and Configuring Accounts (part 3) - Setting Up Exchange Email - Advanced Exchange Server Connectivity

It’s Not All Good

You might discover that, even after performing an advanced setup, Windows Phone 8 cannot connect to Exchange Server. If this happens, verify that you have correctly spelled the fully qualified domain name of your Client Access Server and that the server is externally accessible using this name. In some cases, you might have to use the server’s IP address instead of its name.

The other thing that tends to go wrong is that Windows Phone 8 might have trouble using SSL encryption. Exchange Server uses a certificate to perform SSL encryption. For Windows Phone 8 to be capable of using SSL encryption, the phone must trust the certificate authority (CA) that issued the certificate to Exchange. This is accomplished by using something called a CA certificate. Windows Phone 8 has built-in CA certificates for the most popular commercial certificate authorities. However, if your company uses a certificate that was generated in-house or by a lesser-known commercial certificate authority, the phone will not automatically trust the certificate authority, and SSL encryption will fail (which causes ActiveSync to fail).

The solution to this problem is to set up another mail account (such as a Yahoo! account or a Gmail account) and configure your phone to access it. Next, ask your network administrator to email the required CA certificate to the account that you have just set up. When you receive the message, open the attachment; the certificate will be installed on your phone. You should now be able to sync with Exchange Server.

One last problem that you might encounter is that mail might not synchronize even if everything is set up correctly. This can happen if you have told Windows Phone 8 to synchronize messages from the last 7 days, but all the messages in your Inbox are more than 7 days old.