How I got the iPhone to display my Microsoft Exchange account Sent Mail folder

So I gave up on my Nokia N95-8GB.
The fact that Nokia appeared to have given up on the phone I spent so much money on, its sluggish performance and the outdated operating system could not be compensated by the excellent camera and impeccable phone reception worldwide. That and lugging along a BlackBerry for email as well as the Nokia was silly. The fact that the work-issued BlackBerry Curve was worse in too many facets than it’s older predecessor is a different matter. So i got an iPhone 3Gs.

I love it!

It is fast, things just work, the Internet is usable and with you wherever you are. The virtual keyboard is a spectacular tool when you are dealing with multilingual situations, all the more with right-to-left languages, I love it. Best of all, it connects (unsupported by our IT of course) to our corporate Microsoft Exchange 2003 server account.

Yet I noticed something a bit odd: I was unable to view my Sent mail, viewable in Entourage and Outlook as ‘Sent Items’. Looking online leads to articles mentioning another issue in which Entourage has a problem displaying iPhone sent messages properly (this is sort of a solution), but the issue remains open on Apple’s support boards (and I will post my ‘solution’ experience on it once I am done writing).

When I joined my employer almost four years ago, IT assigned us a first initial+last name@company email addresses (e.g. Joe Blow will become jblow@company.com). Two years ago we migrated to the Exchange system of our parent company where the email address is first name+last name@company (e.g. Joe Blow get an email address of joe.blow@company.com) . I can still and do use my old email address and both work. When I got my iPhone (a true moment of joy), I set it up giving it the short email address (first initial+last name@company, or jblow@company.com). My domain user name is just first initial+last name and it seemed to work – except for the sent mail issue.

Yet that was the actual issue: I had to switch the email address specified in the iPhone settings from the short version (jblow@comany.com) to the long version (joe.blow@company.com). Once I made the change, sent mail appeared just fine. I am not too certain how this translates to other organizations; it may just as well not. But if your Exchange, or possibly Active Directory administrators added email addresses or identities to your account, you may be suffering from the same issue.

Additionally, I am not sure this can be done on the fly by just modifying account settings. I was bold enough to delete the whole account and set it up again. I would definitely try the account settings route first as deleting accounts is always risky (all my contacts were gone, of course). But I am glad it worked and I have access to my sent mail.

Hope this is of help for others. A device so close to perfect makes such imperfections so noticeable and maddening.