BlackBerry Internet Service: An error occurred during email account validation

Summary: User cannot provision account to corporate Exchange OWA using BlackBerry Internet Service. In this instance; the user had already been provisioned and was working correctly. However service broke after we did a domain name change. During this change we updated our OWA certificate to our new Domain name and redirected DNS to point old domain name mail.company.com to mail.newcompany.com.

Any attempts to reprovision his account on the ATT BlackBerry site would yeild "An error occurred during email account validation"

All URL combinations were tried: mail.newcompany.com; mail.newcompany.com\exchange; mail.newcompany.com\owa and mail.newcompany.com\owa\user@newcompany.com.

After viewing the HTTP logs during provisioning; you see:

W3SVC814732 X.X.X.X PROPFIND /owa/myuser/ - 443 myuser X.X.X.X Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+5.01;+Windows+NT+4.0) 501 0 0

The 501 (HTTP error 501) means not implemented. PROPFIND is a webdav verb and it seems that webdav was being blocked only for this user. Other users were working ok. I ran some individual webdav tests and was unable to connect to his account; although I was able to connect to others on Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2003. Enabling WEBDAV on Exchange 2007 did not work.


Resolution: This user's device was provisioned when he was on Exchange 2003. His mailbox was moved to Exchange 2007. Although his account was working for weeks on Exchange 2007; something broke. Possibly the domain name change or maybe a coincidence. After moving the user back to Exchange 2003; I was able to connect to his account using webdav test. The user was able to sucessfully provision his account. We plan on moving his account back to Exchange 2007 to see if it still works.



James Chong (MVP)
MCITP | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+,
Security+, Project+, ITIL
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