Mail and Exchange issues after Catalina upgrade

[TTTedP]

I usually avoid a lot of the bugs and previously had good luck with upgrades but not this time;

I use MacOS Mail with my corp Exchange account added. It worked fine the last 3-4 years and with previous OS versions. Post-Catalina upgrade I am experiencing blank email messages. I do 3 column view and in the preview, I see the unread message and sender, but the previews are blank. When opening the email, they too are blank. In some cases its a white field, in other cases the message disappears completely. The iCloud messages render just fine. On my iOS 13 device the Exchange messages show up fine. It's only in Mail on the machine running Catalina.

I have tried rebuilding the mailbox, resynching, deleting and re-adding the Exchange account and even backing up the .mbox file, deleting everything in ~Library and then re-adding it. Issue still persists. I also now get an import failure on those same .mbox files that import just fine on an older machine.

Only thing I haven't tried is a fresh install of Catalina set up as new but that's too disruptive to do midweek. It's to the point that I have to resort to either using webmail or installing Outlook.

Anyone else experience this?

Other big issue is auto-correct under Catalina seems to be overly aggressive and inconsistent.

 

[TTTedP]

Well, I took drastic measures and did a clean install on my machine. I hate to say it but the problem is still there.

At first all the messages started downloading and rendering correctly. Then emails that previously showed content - became ghosts. Really surprised no one else has mentioned this.

 

[TTTedP]

photo of what I'm talking about

 

[TTTedP]

figured out a clue -

Only thing I am doing different in terms of workflow is I have local folders ("on My Mac") - where I apply rules and move the messages to when they come in. I am noticing the messages left in the 'Exchange' folder render OK.

This worked fine in previous versions of MacOS.

 

[Rigby]

This sounds a lot like the bugs people are encountering with the Mail app on iOS 13 when using Exchange accounts. I assume they are built on the same code base?

 

[TTTedP]

yeah really sucks. My solution has been to move all my folders back under "Exchange" vs "On My Mac" - then rebuild the mailbox. Messages showed back up.

So it seems to be a bug with storing messages locally. I didn't notice it under the iCloud account because they remained IMAP.

Next question is do I reconfigure my mail rules to be server side (in O365) or keep those in Mail to process as things come in.