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Is There a Linux Client Solution for Exchange 2007?
CrazedSanity writes "I have been working at my state job for about 7 months now, using the Exchange plugin for Evolution to check my email. Very recently the higher-ups decided to migrate to Exchange 2007, which effectively destroyed my ability to check my email through any method other than webmail (which means I have to constantly refresh/reload the webmail window). I'm sure somebody else has encountered the problem, but I'm wondering if anybody has come up with a working solution?" Note: CrazedSanity's looking for a client that will work with Exchange in a situation where replacing the Exchange install with an open-source equivalent isn't an option.
but I realized that the webmail was actually better than virtualizing a box or trying in vain to hack the evolution-plugins. I ended up with the following solution:
I have a terminal-window that runs a bash-script that uses wget (or curl, don't really remember) to pull down the webmail-main-page and actually grep for the "boldness" of the new messages. When ever there is a bold line somewhere in the main view it makes a noise and flashes a tcl/tk-window saying that there are new stuff on the web-mail. I tab to the correct place in the firefox, refresh and there you go.
I know the solution is a little weird, but it works and it does what I need, so I really do not care to try out something else (except advocating OSS in my work place).
Troll? I thought that was pretty funny. Have you ever tried to use SMTP commands directly through telnet? Craziness!
Well, Exchange does support IMAP, but usually Exchange admins disable it for the explicit purpose of preventing people from using clients other than Outlook.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I'd imagine most folk that have administered a mail server have sent mail with telnet. It's not difficult and if your new server is doing something weird it can be very useful for diagnosis.
You just do something like:
telnet mail.example.com 25
EHLO me.example.com
MAIL FROM: <me@me.example.com>
RCPT TO: <you@mail.example.com>
DATA
Subject: Message sent with telnet
Here's my message body.
.
By default, Exchange 2007 has POP3 and IMAP services disabled out of the box. An administrator has to run services.msc and change their states from disabled to automatic, and start them. SMTP to the Internet also is disabled and needs to be explicitly enabled, and a command run to get anti-spam agents enabled and running. However, this is not out of malice, this is just a basic common sense "ship as few possibly hackable features running out of the box as possible, let the customer enable what he/she needs" philosophy.
Once the services are enabled, Exchange 2007 is as good a POP/IMAP server as anything out there. Thunderbird works well with it. Of course, both the POP and IMAP servers support SSL/TLS.
Maybe some Windows admins are trained to only allow Outlook to connect, but it takes almost no time at all to allow other E-mail clients such as Thunderbird or mail.app to work without any issues.
# man uuencode
uuencode(1)
NAME
uuencode, uudecode - encode a binary file, or decode its representation
SYNOPSIS
uuencode [-m] [ file ] name
uudecode [-o outfile] [ file ]...
DESCRIPTION ...
Uuencode and uudecode are used to transmit binary files over transmission mediums that do not support other than
simple ASCII data.
OpenChange is an open source MAPI client that supports all versions of Exchange up to and including 2007, it is native MAPI and thus does everything you would expect an Exchange client to do, and it does it a reasonable speed.
http://www.openchange.org/
There is already an Evolution plug-in that will be mainlined into GNOME 2.24. However, you can currently get it for Fedora 10 and other platforms.
The current Evolution plug-in uses OWA web page scrapping and is really lame, and it most likely broke from web interface changes in 2007.
I've spent considerable time trying to get this work and it is still nowhere near being mature enough to be usable.
Don't get me wrong, it's better than it was a few months ago. It will allow Evolution to make a connection and even download most of the folder information. For us, it has trouble deciphering email addresses in the headers, doesn't display some messages at all and, most annoyingly, continues to consume all available memory until it crashes.
FYI, Exchange 2007 no longer includes Outlook CALs.
That's an option.. But why waste resources for just 1 program. Running WINE (http://www.winehq.org) or Crossover would be a much nicer option. Last I checked, Office 2003 runs near perfectly and you don't need to spend the money or the resources on running an entire Windows OS on top of a Linux install.
Just my 0.0002 cents
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555851
If Office 2003 worked, then Evolution would work.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Our email is being moved over to Exchange.. after being moved off Exchange, to something else.
Previously, the admins dared not place Exchange on the internet, lest it be hacked. So the only way to get your mail was via VPN. Since they configure the concentrator to only allow Windows clients with the firewalling on, you can't access anything on your local network, and yea verily, this did sucketh.
Presently, there is a public IMAP server (running some variety of not-Exhange). And it's nice to be able to get your email without crippling your network connection, and from the IMAP client of your choice (ie, Thunderbird), installed on the device of your choice.
Soon, they intend to move us back onto Exchange. Because they still dare not place Exchange onto the internet, it will be secured behind something called Intelligent Application Gateway, which appears to be some kind of SSL proxy server.
So our options are....
Given that the current solution works fine, I'm none too happy ; reading the announcement the first question that arose was "Are they idiots?", closely followed by "How fat was the wad of sweaty Billbucks they were given?"
Your options are ; give money to MS, or use a client that sucks (OWA lite). All the other clients suck LESS than OWA Lite, but to access any of them you must give some money to MS. Minimum spend being "a copy of a MS operating system", for IE, and maximum being Outlook. I'm not sure what the license cost of an IAG tunnel client is, but since you have to run it on Windows, it's a guaranteed winner for MS.
Why? Does the mail server you are trying to connect to not support the latest SMTP RFC?
Using "EHLO" can give you extended information that tells you the capabilities of the mail server, and when you're trying to diagnose a problem, that's a good thing. Many times I have figured out a mail server is misconfigured from only the response to "EHLO".
As the post above you mentions, I don't think you entirely get the point. Telnet as well as being a way toget a remote shell is also a great way to communicate with servers that use ASCII protocols. For instance I can enter "$ telnet google.ca 80" and type in "GET / HTTP/1.0" and it will return 200 OKAY plus the google homepage. The same goes for SMTP and FTP. So as long as the server supports SMTP you can "telnet" into it.
The more you know.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
Or ask if you can remote-in via RDP to a server (or even an XP box) running terminal services. RDesktop is a lot less resource-intensive than running Windows/Outlook in a VM.
Someone in the company has to have a Windows box that can accept incoming connections.
Heck, grab an old dusty PC, toss Windows on it, see if you can put it behind your monitor, then RDP or VNC to it.
It's 2008, I have eleven computers in my cube; people literally do not know where to throw all their Pentium 4s. I just sent an email to our director asking him to clarify what the procedure is for getting rid of all this stuff is, since I virtualize pretty much everything now.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
The OWA ("web scraping") Evolution plugin is no longer developed. The new approach is MAPI, which is the connectivity solution for Exchange 2007. Just search for Evolution Exchange MAPI.
Try and get your hands on a copy of TinyXP Rev05. It is the smallest XP re-spin I have found. It uses no more than 45MB RAM after boot-up, leaving plenty of space for your applications.
I'll second this.
Alternately you can use NLite (www.nliteos.com) to take your existing XP CD and strip it down.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
MS publishes the APIs for how their RPC over HTTPS, think its current name is now Outlook Anywhere works. They do this basically so that cell phone and other mobile applications can access the Exchange server. If you want to create a Linux based E-mail app or add functionality to connect to Exchange 2007 that doesn't use IMAP or POP, the best methodology would be to create a connection using the Outlook Anywhere APIs. It could be a cool project, I would be interested in working on it with anybody who wants to step up. Perhaps a interesting approach could be to build Outlook Anyway to IMAP intermediate application that could then be employed to act as an intermediary between whatever Linux client or heck even Windows mail client you wish to use and Exchange 2007. I mean basically you could put the app on your machine, set it first to talk to Exchange 2007 and then setup mail client of choice to talk to IMAP and SMTP on intermediary app. Not saying it wouldn't introduce some delay, but if done right, it would be "wicked helpful" If done in JAVA or "I cannot even believe I am suggesting this" .NET limited to mono supported APIs, then it could be single app for both Window and Linux users. Hit me back if you would be interested in doing something like this. I think we should call it "Mailman in the Middle".
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