Lately I have been getting an increasing number of complaints regarding users not being able to download attachments synced from Exchange with their iPhone.
The iPhones in question are either 3G or 3GS with firmware 3.0 or later. Exchange 2003.
The majority of messages come in just fine. Some however display: "This message has not been downloaded from the server" where the email's text normally should be. At the bottom of the email, it states: "This message is only partially downloaded." It has a button labeled "Download remaining 0 bytes." If you click this button, it states that it is loading and then reverts to the same screen.
The odd part is that this only affects some emails. Most come in fine with attachments working.
I've taken the same email that was not working on my iPhone. Sent it to a gmail account that my iPhone had access to. The message and attachment opened fine.
Any ideas of possible causes I could look into?
Thanks.
EDIT: The same occurs on 4.0 +
Offhand this sounds like a problem with the EAS client on the iPhone. I have found that occasionally the iPhone mail app will get stuck and requires a reboot of the device before it will resume its normal sync behavior.
Did you try updating all your devices to the latest available version of iOS 4, as it better manages Exchange / ActiveSync ?
Are you running the latest firmware? Unless you have legal / compliance issues, or you test it and find it breaks something, you really should use the latest firmware...
(+1 each to Paul and Studer.)
I've seen the same thing, with it usually resulting in a message perpetually stuck on the device, with a reboot not helping. All other mail was flowing properly, it was just that one message, so EAS appeared to be working properly. In my case, I had to remove the account from my iPhone, and add it back in again. I'm using a 3G with 4.0.1
Something to try: Send yourself an email, watch both the phone and Outlook. Once you see it in Outlook, delete it immediately. Check on the phone. I think that I may have had an instance where I deleted it in Outlook, while it was mid-download to the phone, and it got a partial copy. Since it couldn't get it from the server any longer, it was stuck in the "this message was not downloaded from the server" state.
As with any troubleshooting, you should also make sure you are up to date on the iPhone as well, 3.x is getting rather old, and you should seriously think about updating.
(Multiple exchange accounts, FTW)
Not really a solution, but we recently implemented a new Exchange 2010 mail server and we have not seen any of these problems with Exchange 2010.