Re: [Evolution] evolution-ews: custom SMTP server

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Wed, 2016-03-02 at 22:37 +0000, Johnson, Brett E (HPE Linux
Enablement) wrote:
> It's a horrible kludge, but I've solved this problem by setting up a
> ghost IMAP/SMTP account connecting to exchange, and having the same email address.

        Hi,
you are right, this is the way to achieve it from UI. Maybe a slightly
better option would be to define the account as None/SMTP, not
IMAP/SMTP, thus having a send-only account.

Setting the EWS to use a SMTP server from UI is not possible, though it
could be done manually by playing with underlying files. If you check
the content of ~/.config/evolution/sources, then you can find there
several .source files which contain "[Mail Transport]" (quotes for
clarity only) strings/sections. If you have configured one EWS account
and one SMTP account, then there will be two of them, one with

   [Mail Transport]
   BackendName=ews

and the other with
   
   [Mail Transport]
   BackendName=smtp

This defines what backend is used for message sending. The EWS backend
doesn't have any other settings, thus the file is pretty small, while
the SMTP backend has additional [Authentication] and [Security]
sections, which define where to connect and so on.

If you change the BackendName from the "ews" to "smtp" and copy the
[Authentication] and [Security] sections to the EWS file (and keep the
rest of the EWS file as it is), then the UI might use SMTP for sending,
even you'd not be able to change any setting of the SMTP server from
the UI.

Please note that it's a workaround, you'd be playing with underlying
and private files of the evolution-data-server, and you should ideally
do that when no other evolution process is running (there are couple
background processes, see `ps ax | grep evolution`). If anything would
go wrong, then delete the account from UI and reconfigure it from
scratch. The steps above are also supposed to work, but it's untested.

Maybe an enhancement request to be able to define a SMTP server for
evolution-ews accounts filled in https://bugzilla.gnome.org would make
sense.
        Bye,
        Milan