As I am aware of you cant set exchange manually. Only EAS and thats different.
Anybody else seeing this behaviour?
I dont wanna upgrade and screw things up for clients once again....

If MAPI was enabled for the account, previously that was the favored protocol when setting up Outlook. Maybe something with autodiscover has changed? Or maybe something in the SM code changed or maybe it's a setting we have to enable?

We have everything set up correctly for MAPI for several years.  I recall always having to select the "Exchange" icon in Outlook manually,

It should fetch settings automagically and not having to set it up manually.

IN the new versions of outlook no such option exist.

Previously, you'd enter the email address, then get a prompt to select the account type (Exchange, IMAP, etc). But now, it seems that you enter the email address and if you do nothing else, Outlook will assume IMAP. To get back to that selection prompt, you have to check the box in the wizard for Manual setup... then you can choose Exchange and then proceed as normal and the autodiscover seems to work. But the difference is that if you don't select the manual checkbox, Outlook auto assumes IMAP and it's not so obvious.  

@Michael, are you absolutely positive the autodiscover record for that particular mail domain is set up properly?

We've learned that autodiscover expects this hostname to be mail.domain.com.  We used to use different hostnames, but it seems modern autodiscover is pretty uptight about wanting mail in the FQDN for autodiscover.  Once we changed to 'mail' from our previous naming convention (per Kyle in ST support) all of our autodiscover problems went away.

 

Jay Dubb we're pretty confident that the autodiscover is set properly, because once we select manual setup and choose the Exchange icon the rest works fine. It just seems that Outlook by default is choosing IMAP vs. Exchange if you just enter address and continue.

@Michael ... hmm, odd.  We did see exactly that problem ourselves-- Outlook selecting IMAP instead of MAPI when we were using hostnames with 'mx' instead of 'mail'.  Example: 'mx1.domain.com' instead of 'mail.domain.com'.

Kyle in ST support said to change the 'mx' FQDNs to 'mail' and we resisted, because we'd been doing it that way for over 20 years.  But, once we followed his advice, all of our autodiscover problems stopped.  He said Microsoft is a lot more intolerant of non-'mail' hostnames now than previously.  So, even if you are confident in your setup, it might be worth doing one last end-to-end check.  (also make sure MAPI is actually enabled for the domain and the user accounts themselves)

Note that you do NOT have to change the actual name of the server.  Just start using 'mail.domain.com' in your DNS A records, autodiscover records, and in the "Hostname" field in each domain's Configuration tab.

It sounds crazy, but as soon as we made that simple change (thanks, Kyle) Outlook started connecting with MAPI by default.

 

We use this one for verification and testing.

https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com/tests/Ola/input

Kyle is very good and very helpful! Really appreciate his efforts and help.

Outlook defaulting to IMAP instead of MAPI is almost always an autodiscover problem. Here are the criteria I check before adding a MAPI account: 

1. Does https://mail.customer-domain.com land on the SmarterMail web interface and without SSL errors?

2. Does https://autodiscover.customer-domain.com land on the SmarterMail web interface and without SSL errors?

3. Does the customer-domain.com DNS server have an SRV record referencing mail.customer-domain.com on port 443?

Outlook will also probe https://customer-domain.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml intermittently as well. That isn't normally an issue unless you have something else answering with autodiscover details there already, or failing to redirect that request back to your SmarterMail server. 

Also - Thanks Brian :) It is a pleasure working with you all as well!

Also, I wanted to add that we're not seeing Outlook default to IMAP here in our test domains or production domains on the current public or dev builds, so that is why I'm leaning on autodiscover being our likely culprit.

Thanks all. @kyle I'll open up a ticket and we can dig deeper.

Hello everyone! I just wanted to give you a quick update on these issues as we were able to get to the bottom of it. If you add your MAPI enabled account while already inside of Outlook, it will default to an IMAP sync point instead of MAPI. If you use this process instead you should be able to get your MAPI account up and running:

1. Close Outlook and open the Control Panel in Windows. 

2. Switch to Icon view, then locate and open the Mail control panel icon. 

3. Click on Profiles and create yourself a new profile for your SmarterMail account. 

4. Follow through the account addition/setup wizard that launches after you create a new profile. 

That should be it! Something about going in through the Control Panel seems to do the trick so this should help you get going in the right direction in the meantime while we investigate further. If that does not help in your case I ask that you submit a ticket so we can get it investigated and escalated as well. Thanks everyone!