Friday, November 18, 2011

Windows Phone 7 Crashes while setting up Outlook Email to Exchange

The Background
I had dropped my phone one too many times and the front glass had cracked. The phone was still usable but I was tired of looking through cracks. It was also starting to act funny sometimes and not haha funny.
I had an an identical phone just sitting in a box and not being used I decided to finally move across to it. It was fairly painless. The only hitch I hit was while setting up my exchange email account on the phone.

The Problem
I clicked on the "Outlook" account and put in my email address and password. It then after a little while asked me for my username and domain name. This is most likely due to my username being a little different from my email address. I put it in and my domain name and clicked on. After a short period of time I got this message.
At the top it said "...and we've found them!" and then the error message "Oops! We're having a problem that we can't solve at the moment. Try again later."

This was confusing because I have 7 other phones just like this that are working just fine. Here were the differences that had happened between my previous phone and this phone.

  • All email with exchange had been setup pre-mango. Maybe something with Mango didn't jive with my exchange server. I doubt this one.
  • I had changed my username to where it no longer matched(don't think this is the issue)
  • Before we had a private cert and now we use a GoDaddy Cert.
  • I had also setup auto-discover settings to work
I feel this is something with our auto-discover settings(although outlook and other phone OSs don't have a problem with them outside of our network) since I had done this for other Phones to different exchange servers and not had a problem. I can't guarantee this which is why I put this post up.

The Solution
Windows Phone tries to ask for the least amount of email information when setting up an account. If it doesn't work it asks you for more information. Then if it doesn't work a second time it shows you advanced settings. Well I just fed it wrong information till it showed me advanced settings.

I then manually entered all the settings correctly. Since it doesn't need to auto-discover any settings than it instantly creates the email account and starts syncing. This allows you to bypass whatever is causing it to choke. After a short time it should then start pulling down your emails, tasks, contacts, and events.

I am now running it for a week on the new phone and enjoying it.

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