iOS Hosted Exchange email search - not searching server

[rgerman]

Hello,

We are using hosted exchange email and have been using our current provider for a few years without issue. It has worked great all our iOS devices.

About two months ago I received a report that searchiing exchange email on company iPhones was only returning search results for the last 30 days. After several tests, I confirmed that the mail app in iOS on iPhones and iPads was not searching exchange, but only the local cached email on the iOS device. We are running the latest iOS on our iPhones and iPads. This problem was not present in the past... Searches used to search the local cache, then search exchange and provide years of search results.

Has anyone else seen this problem? I am not sure if it is an iOS issue or if something is going on with our Exchange provider...

[user-qadqEmJsVR]

Hi rgerman,

Have you found any solution on this? We are still facing same issue with iPad and iPhones (iOS 14.5).

We extracted a few logs from exchange server and we noticed that when search is triggered it calls a « FIND » function on exchange, I used a test phone with Mobileiron (Email+) and their client calls the « SEARCH » function on Exchange server. SEARCH brings accurate results where FIND gives random results, maybe because it uses only cache locally as you were mentioning…

This is unacceptable on a business environment.

[rgerman]

Hi Toni,
Take this with a grain of salt... This is what I found, but it seems hard to believe MS would do something like that.

In order for searches to go beyond 30 days with my hosted exchange provider, I had to use IMAP. My hosted exchange vendor said Microsoft Exchange "On premise or hosted Exchange will now only search 30days in iOS" They said Office 365 does not have this issue and a search in O365 will return 500 results. I only had one heavy duty iOS email user so what I did as a work around was load their account once as Exchange so they could get push notifications, then I loaded the account again as IMAP and called it Exchange search. Pretty messy, but it was a work around.

Here are comments from my vendor "This is by design, when search is performed in EXO the search works differently and the result are different from the Exchange On Prem server. The result for EXO is approximately 500 Items and for On Prem it won’t go over 30 days back."

Not a great answer... and the results from my testing are 2 years old... thinks may have changed.

Good luck,
Ray