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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.
Virtualize a Windows box with Outlook.
Take a dollar, divide it by 100, take two and call me in the morning.
Just telnet in and use SMTP commands.
uhm, thunderbird ?
or one of the many other mail clients?
Ummm... Tbird doesn't speak Exchange's protocol.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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).
The worst part is you end up paying for Office 2007 when you're only going to use one application that doesn't do a very good job of what it's meant for anyways.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
You could also configure the IMAP service on the Exchange server and use a regular mail client like Thunderbird. You still get the semi-realtime mail updates of Exchange, though you won't get things like Calendar sync or server-based contacts.
Take a dollar, divide it by 100, take two and call me in the morning.
Did you try the work they were doing here? They did mention that it's supposed to work with Exchange 2007.
"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
One of the many howtos on how to setup thunderbird/lightning with an exchange server: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/03/30/howto-thunderbird-and-ms-exchange-server/?
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.
Upgrade to thundercougerfalconbird!
I just waited until the same higher-ups that forced the upgrade got so fed up with the poor performance of Exchange 2007 that they forced us to switch back.
Took about 3 weeks.
You can use Outlook 2003 with Exchange 2007 if the Exchange admin hasn't disabled access for older clients. I think Outlook 2003 works better with Crossover than Outlook 2007.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
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.
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 thought most countries had laws against cruel and unusual punishments!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruel_and_unusual_punishment
I guess those usually only apply to the government.
Yes, Zimbra, and many other Groupware solutions meant just for that purpose.
go, voltron!
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.
FYI, Exchange 2007 no longer includes Outlook CALs.
The Exchange 2007 web services API should make this job easier.
Introduction to Exchange Web Services in Exchange 2007
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb408417.aspx
New Programmability Features in Exchange Server 2007
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332450.aspx
More discussions:
Exchange 2007
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3891474
http://psankar.blogspot.com/2007/10/write-evolution-plugins-using-mono-c.html
"Exchange Server 2007 has a Exchange Web-Services Interface. IIUC Working with web-services should be a lot easier and featureful when done via Mono than plain C. So implementing support for Exchange 2007 can be done via this Mono plugins (which I am planning to takeup as my ITO task)"
If your job requires Windows, perhaps maybe you should, uhh, install Windows.
Similes are like metaphors
IMHO, that's not an option. TELNET into Exchange Servers nowadays has been (mostly) blocked due to the inherent vulnerabilities, i.e.- taking over an e-mail server. Not only that, but what with IMAP, SMTP is about the last thing anyone wants in this 'make it pretty' world in the newer servers. I've gotten along with 'mail' and 'pine' for the longest time, but not everything is easy to someone who doesn't understand how to or has not learned the 'old' ways; or how an e-mail server works. Everything doesn't need to be GUI, but try to do anything without it (at least in the world of the average user).
What folks seem to be missing here is that the attraction to Exchange isn't that it's just a mail server. It's the calendaring, tightly coupled with the server that makes it work. Nothing else short of Google Apps has come close to working as well as Outlook + Exchange does.
Now, having said that, there's plenty of good work going on integrating other systems together (I personally run standard IMAP / SMTP for mail, and use Google Calendar for my calendaring). This works great, but is not 'exchange compatable'.
There are some other workarounds - An outlook 2007 client can be configured to publish it's calendar up into Google Calendar via some plugins - once you do that, Thunderbird + Lightning comes very very close to working the same as Outlook does, but it's not exactly an elegant solution.
We've hit hte same problem at one of my clients regarding Outlook 2007 - Evolution no longer works, and some of hte Linux folks are stuck.
The last bit is, as others have said, a vmware install of XP -just- running Outlook. It's not as horrible as you might think :)
Event Management Solutions : http://www.stonekeep.com/
Exchange is more than a mail server.
It's an Adventure!
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.
There is a utility called fetchexc that will fetch incoming mail from Exchange 2000/2003 OWA servers. It would need some updating to work with 2007, though.
http://www.saunalahti.fi/juhrauti/index.html
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Exchange is more than a mail server.
You misspelled "less".
(joking, not trolling)
The original Howling Frog is a fictional character and has no UID.
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.
IMAP under Exchange 2003 is such a joke I can't imagine they actually fixed in Exchange 2007. Exchange IMAP routinely fails on every system I have running thunderbird, Windows, Linux or Mac. It works for awhile but eventually I have to restart Thunderbird to get messages to load.
I'm curious why you say IMAP is fundamentally broken. As a side note, Gmail's POP is quirky; I find that IMAP works much better with Gmail.
I need to store my mail on my mail server (so I can get to my mail from multiple computers), and I like using a local mail client. I need to consolidate mail from six e-mail addresses into one mailbox, so setting POP to "leave mail on the server" isn't a solution. How would you suggest I do this?
The only way I know of would be to set all my other addresses to be forwards instead of full-fledged mailboxes, but that has the undesirable side effect of not allowing me to log in to a particular account's web interface to be able to send mail with the proper return address (I occasionally need to do this). I could also set those accounts to be both mailboxes *and* forwards, but then I've got extra copies of my mail lying around all over the place, and spam would never get deleted, and then my mailboxes would overflow and I'd have to clean up giant piles of paper... you get the idea.
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.
IIRC, the "single instance storage" feature was removed from Exchange 2007. I heard a lame reason, something along the lines that it was becoming too complex to maintain the code.
No. Lotus Notes is disqualified due to the "solution" requirement.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Yes it does. Just go to http://exchangeserver/public (replace exchangeserver with the FQDN of your server)
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
We're going to be trying Brutus at our office, for possible deployment to select clients who don't want/need all users running Outlook. They are using Outlook Web Access for many employees, but the problem a tech sees is the users commonly click on an email link, and currently their Novell mail client still comes up.
Brutus requires a connecting agent to be installed server-side, so isn't an option for everyone. But if you're in a position where you have sway with the server admins (or are one), it could be a viable solution.
As to the suggestions of Thunderbird/etc, this is good, but can they get full calendar support? This is very important in an exchange environment, where calendaring (shared calendars, delegates, etc) is the killer feature.
I've been pushing to offer Zimbra or similar as an alternative to Exchange for our clients, but I've still got some headway to make there.
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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