Hello everyone!

I have a problem with my N900. I am using Mail for exchange to sync my Google contacts & calendar.
Initial sync worked well - after a few syncs MfE refused to sync anything - it would sit there forever saying "Syncing...".
Then I did a "Initial sync" again and I was able to get all of my contacts back from the server.

But there are still issues:

• The birthday of all contacts is displayed wrong in the address book and calendar (+1 day)
• After a few syncs Exchange sync stops working on the N900 again (says "Synchronizing..." and nothing happens)

What is up with this? I did a couple of reboots, removed the Exchange account and added a new one - but the problem does not go away. It looks like sync is horribly broken! Or did I miss anything? Can anybody help me with this?

Thanks!


(My software release: 2.2009.51-1, no updates available)

MfE synch with Google is not supported, so that behaviour is par for the course. As for birthdays - I've had similar issues before (both with the N900 and with other phones), usually related in some way to time zones, but it's been working fine on my N900 with MfE (synching with Exchange 2003) since the last update.

I don't understand what should be so special about Google. It's just a normal Exchange server - it should work like any other Exchange server. I never experienced such problems on my Nokia 5800XM with MfE.
The weird thing is that I can always sync a few times before it stops working.

Google isn't like a normal Exchange server - they use a modified version of the ActiveSync protocol, so it's specific to Google.

I guess this is due to different companies using different standards. Google and Microsoft are two such companies that push their own standards and unfortunatly its people like you and me stuck in the middle.

If companies could agree basic standards life would be easier for all of us !!! as if that would ever happen lol.

Lets hope Nokia and Maemo will improve MFE to make it compatible, i use a contact/calender sync with google to keep my many devices and mail clients all in sync, so this would be a good if we could get it fixed !!

OK, maybe you are right. I discovered something interesting though: MfE works as long as I do not merge any contacts in the address book with their corresponding Skype/GoogleTalk nicknames.

Merging contacts seems to break MfE. This is what makes me think that the wohle thing is not Google's fault. Has anybody ever merged contacts and synced to any Exchange server afterwards?

Yep - syncing to Exchange 2003 works fine for me after merging IM contacts.

About the birthday problem: it could be a timezone problem, but my N900 as well as my Google Calender are set to "GMT+1".

Is there any way to specify the timezone of MfE? I know there was a similar issue with the iPhone (birthdays one day off after syncing with Exchange) - it was fixed in OS3.0 and it was not Google's fault.

- direx

Hi direx,

did you find a solution for the problem? I have the same problem with google exchange and mfe. All birthdays in google are correct, but at my N900 every birthday is 1 day plus.

skull77