Re: [Evolution] Access Microsoft Exchange Server mailboxes with Evolution

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Fri, 2016-07-29 at 12:55 +0200, Tom wrote:
> How finds the time to complete with me this table ? Maybe with
> Evolution version numbers and exact name of the plugin packages
> needed ?

        Hi,
there are four ways to access Microsoft Exchange servers.

The oldest is evolution-exchange, which supported the Exchange 2003
servers only and it's abandoned (non-functional) with the current
stable versions (3.20.x) and many versions back. It had been replaced
by the evolution-mapi, which uses MAPI protocol (and OpenChange with
Samba). It can connect to any Exchange server which allows MAPI
protocol, thus even to older than 2003 servers. The MAPI protocol
itself had been deprecated since 2007 by the Microsoft, when it
introduced the Exchange Web Services (EWS) protocol. Evolution connects
to it using evolution-ews. Since Exchange 2013 servers the MAPI
protocol is disabled by default.

Due to this, and the dependency footprint, the evolution-mapi is left
only for the backward compatibility (to have possibility to connect to
older servers) and the current preferred way to connect to
Exchange 2007 and later servers is the evolution-ews.

There is also an evolution-activesync side project, which uses
ActiveSync for connection to the Exchange servers. I do not have such
detailed information on its state.

If you are interested only of the e-mail, then the IMAP/POP & SMTP are
provided by the Exchange servers, thus if it's not disabled by the
server admins these standard protocols can be used too. As they are
only for e-mail, the user loses the integration with the calendars and
address books.

        Hope it helps,
        Milan