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Is There a Linux Client Solution for Exchange 2007?
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Sep 23, 2008 12:27 PM
from the switch-to-postcards dept.
from the switch-to-postcards dept.
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.
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Linux: Drop-In Replacement For Exchange Now Open Source 434 comments
Fjan11 writes "Over 150 man-years of work were added to the Open Source community today when Zarafa decided to put their successful Exchange server replacement under GPLv3. This is not just the typical mail-server-that-works-with-Outlook, it is the whole package — including 100% MAPI, web access, tasks, iCal and Activesync. (The native syncing works great with my iPhone!) Binaries and source are available for all major Linux distros."
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Quick and dirty (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Quick and dirty (Score:5, Interesting)
There's not a silver bullet here unfortunately. A VM, while handy and possible, isn't an elegant solution and it sounds like he's been working off of Evolution, so we're pretty much looking at just getting mail running. Easiest way: ask the local techs to make sure IMAP is running and install Thunderbird. Like I said, not ideal, but that's when you get when Microsoft decides not to play nicely with others.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Like I said, using a VM to run Outlook can work. However, it's a lot more
Re:Quick and dirty (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Quick and dirty (Score:4, Informative)
I'll second this.
Alternately you can use NLite (www.nliteos.com) to take your existing XP CD and strip it down.
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Re:Quick and dirty (Score:4, Informative)
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
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Re:Quick and dirty (Score:5, Informative)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555851 [microsoft.com]
If Office 2003 worked, then Evolution would work.
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Re:Quick and dirty (Score:5, Insightful)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555851 [microsoft.com]
If Office 2003 worked, then Evolution would work.
Nice KB Microsoft: "The eliminate of the creation of Public Folder store and the connection from this Public Folder store to the mailbox store."
Apparently working with Exchange 2007 also causes brain damage...
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Re:Quick and dirty (Score:4, Funny)
"The eliminate of the creation of Public Folder store and the connection from this Public Folder store to the mailbox store."
The English the motherlanguage not mine, clod insensitive!
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Re:Quick and dirty (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Duh (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
i've used it.. and some times still do to send quick messages to people..
Re:Duh (Score:5, Informative)
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.
.
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Re:Duh (Score:4, Funny)
Of course, things get a little trickier if you need to attach a binary file to the message.
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Re:Duh (Score:5, Informative)
# 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.
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Re:Duh (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Duh (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Duh (Score:5, Funny)
Informative?
A guy suggesting, seriously as far as I can work out, that you can replace Outlook with TELNET! is marked "informative?"
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Duh (Score:5, Informative)
Why? Does the mail server you are trying to connect to not support the latest SMTP RFC [ietf.org]?
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".
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Re:Duh...TELNET?? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Re:Duh (Score:5, Funny)
Do you mean to tell me you have not written and debugged a sendmail.cf file?
Anyone who has knows that Sendmail should be boycotted for not properly crediting Lovecraft in the design of sendmail.cf
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I had the same problem (Score:3, Informative)
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).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
evolution branch (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:evolution branch (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Yeah, that sounds like early stage Evolution. It was ridiculously unstable for a long time, and still gives me occasional problems and, at the least, UI issues when connecting to a large mailbox.
It's more one of those instances where either some company has to put a few dollars in to help out with development, or just wait it out and hope someone else does it first.
perhaps use thunderbird (Score:3, Informative)
What I did... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
OpenChange (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [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.
Conform (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem isn't mail. It's everything else. (Score:3, Informative)
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 :)
Probably IAG (Score:5, Informative)
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 [microsoft.com], 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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
uhm, thunderbird ?
or one of the many other mail clients?
Ummm... Tbird doesn't speak Exchange's protocol.
Re:what am I missing here... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, Exchange does support IMAP, but usually Exchange admins disable it for the explicit purpose of preventing people from using clients other than Outlook.
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Re:what am I missing here... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:what am I missing here... (Score:5, Funny)
Exchange is more than a mail server.
It's an Adventure!
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Exchange is more than a mail server.
You misspelled "less".
(joking, not trolling)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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 forwa
Re:what am I missing here... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:what am I missing here... (Score:4, Funny)
go, voltron!
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Re:Where's the outrage? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Yes. Zimbra. (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, Zimbra, and many other Groupware solutions meant just for that purpose.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Zimbra looks nice right up until it comes time to pay for it.
Zimbra mobile and blackberry support are only available for the pay versions.
Outlook/Mapi sync and ISync are only available in the professional version.
I don't mind paying and frankly the price is very good but I really don't like the idea of "Renting" software. You must pay by the seat and by the year for standard and Professional version. What A PAIN.
Every time you hire somebody are you going to to have to go through a bunch of stuff to add a se
Re:Meh. (Score:5, Funny)
No. Lotus Notes is disqualified due to the "solution" requirement.
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