Re: [Evolution] Evolution 2.12.2 Is A BIG Dissapointment

[Paul Smith <psmith gnu org>]

On Mon, 2008-01-14 at 16:53 -0500, Rick Bilonick wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-01-14 at 09:52 -0500, Art Alexion wrote:
> > I'm wondering if earlier versions of Outlook connect to Exchange 2007.

They probably do.  There might be limited functionality.  But Evolution
doesn't connect to the Exchange server using the MAPI protocol (which is
a proprietary Microsoft protocol with no publicly available
documentation that I'm aware of).

Evolution's Exchange connector connects to the Outlook Web Access (OWA)
interface.  In other words, Evo looks to the Exchange server like a web
browser client.

Since OWA is 100% server side (from Exchange's point of view) there is
absolutely no reason for Microsoft to have any "backward compatibility"
between Exchange versions.

But, since Evo has to parse the resulting HTML and figure out how to
present it to you, and also understand what POST etc. operations are
needed to send mail, calendaring, etc., any change to the OWA interface
breaks Evolution Exchange rather badly.

> We would all be happier if Outlook never existed. As I understand it,
> the protocols for Exchange 2007 are available so it should be easier to
> integrate. My point was that once all the 2003 servers are migrated to
> 2007, Evolution won't be of any use for accessing Exchange servers.

See above.  As far as I know, Microsoft has still not published the MAPI
protocols.  It's just that people are making headway on reverse
engineering them, just like the Samba folks did for SMB etc.  Note that
my understanding is that the MAPI protocols are NOT included in the
recent settlement between Microsoft and the EU that Samba is taking
advantage of.

> None of this explains why in the latest version spam filtering (using
> bogofilter) no longer works.

With Exchange, or with POP/IMAP?  I've never been able to get spam
filtering working with Exchange.  That's OK with me because my company
does spam filtering at the Exchange server side.

Spam filtering (using bogofilter) works great for me for my POP and IMAP
accounts and has for a long time, with various versions of Ubuntu up to
and including 7.10 (Evo 2.12) and it continues to work today with the
latest SVN version of Evo (2.21).

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