Note sure if this is the right forum? Anyway, the problem is Outlook for Android.
Some colleagues have access to their Exchange (on-premisse) account using Outlook on their smartphone. To allow this, I have port 443 open on the firewall. A simple but not very secure method, as the ProxyLogon leak showed. I DO have locked down access to only allow Dutch IP-adressess. But anyhow, I want something more secure, like VPN. So I set up a VPN configuration on the firewall to allow access to port 443 on the Exchange server. And to be able to access that server by name, I also allowed access to port 53 on a local DNS server. Installed VPN client on a smartphone running Android and when the VPN is enabled, I can use a webbrowser to access OWA on the Exchange server by it’s local name, like http://server.company.com.
With this working, it should be easy to change the Outlook settings on the phone with the new server address. And there the fun begins. You cannot change account settings like server address, login name, password etc. in Outlook. No way. Out of the question. It took me a while to realize it can’t be done. Surely I was doing something wrong, since the ability to change those settings is pretty basic. But not for the people of Microsoft. Right.
So in Outlook on the phone, delete account, create new account. Fill in the exact same settings of the old account, but for the server address changed it from mail.company.nl to server.company.nl. Outlooks responds Login error. The connection to your mail server timed out. Please check your mail settings. The last sentence is a good one; when you tap OK, you don’t get back to the account settings, no, you’re sent back to the Choose account type page. And start all over again. Without any luck.
So I remove the Outlook app, restarted the phone, installed it again, tried again configuring without success, deleted the Outlook data, restarted the phone, tried again …. etc. No result. Message is the same every time. Then I tried the Gmail app. Created a new account using the exact same account settings I had tried with Outlook and… works without any issue.
My conclusion:
- There’s no problem on the server side
- There’s no problem with the VPN
- There’s no problem with the phone
- There’s no problem with the Gmail app.
- There IS a problem with the Outlook app.
Now I don’t care having to use the Gmail app instead of Outlook, but my colleagues DO. They want Outlook on their phone. So how do I tackle this problem? If at all?
