Apple Calendar not syncing with Exchange

By · · 1 min read · Tech

I’ve been pulling my hair out recently trying to figure out why Calendar on my Mac won’t synchronise my calendar with one of my Exchange (Office 365) accounts.

Mail and Contacts is working perfectly, and other accounts were synchronising just fine - with the exception of one account that was displaying an error “Calendar needs a valid email address to connect to the Exchange account…”.

I checked the logs and there were some interesting errors too:

23/03/2015 1:30:36.094 pm CalendarAgent[4630]: [com.apple.calendar.store.log.exchange] [Exchange error Calendar can’t refresh the account “Personal”. The primary email address for the account can’t be found. ((null))]
23/03/2015 1:30:36.094 pm CalendarAgent[4630]: [com.apple.calendar.store.log.persistent.operation] [CalOperationQueue (x-coredata://1697A90D-CB02-4A89-8C28-A6F16765B653/ExchangePrincipal/p38): <CalExchangeSyncAccountOperation: 0x7f8d82ed47b0> failed with error Error Domain=CalExchangeErrorDomain Code=-2 "Calendar can’t refresh the account “Personal”." UserInfo=0x7f8d8526b000 {NSLocalizedDescription=Calendar can’t refresh the account “Personal”., NSLocalizedFailureReason=The primary email address for the account can’t be found.}.]

I finally started comparing every setting between a known working calendar and the calendar that was failing both in the Office 365 console and using PowerShell.

Eventually I noticed one setting that was different - “Hide from address lists” was turned active. This particular account is private and I didn’t want it appearing in the Exchange GAL (Global Address List).

As somewhat of a last resort I disabled the option again and saved. Within a minute or two my calendar started syncing again.

While I was troubleshooting this issue I came across numerous others experiencing the same problem but no resolution. I hope that this can help!