Re: Does Tinymail have plan to support Exchange?

["Dirk-Jan C. Binnema" <dirk-jan binnema nokia com>]

Hi Kwan hon Lee,

On Tue, 25 Nov 2008, ext Kwan hong Lee wrote:

> I'm development mail client with Tinymail. It's a good solution to
> make email client.  Thanks to all:)
> 
> Anyway, my boss ask to me does email client support exchange. So I'm
> trying to find how can I support it, now.
> 
> It will be the best way if Tinymail supports. But 0.0.9 does not. And
> I svn version either.
> 
> So I want to know is there any plan to support excange. And if so,
> when it comes real?

[ sorry for the long answer, hope the mailing list archive will make it
  useful for future similar questions ]

Asking an open-source project (or any project for that matter) when some
yet-unimplemented feature will become available, does not usually bring
a very reliable answer...

Anyway, if the Exchange server supports IMAP (the Exchange
administrators need to turn that on), Tinymail will with Exchange just
fine. Have tested test, works great.

If they *don't*, the situation gets a bit harder. Tinymail shares its
mail protocol implementations with Evolution, and Evolution has
so-called 'providers' for both the WebDAV and MAPI protocols, either of
which you can use to get your mail (and calendar info) from an Exchange
server; which one you need depends on the version.  Look around at
http://www.go-evolution.org/MAPIProvider The recent MAPI support also
requires Samba v4 etc.; it's not so tiny...

So, Evolution has these providers - *theoretically* they should also
work with Tinymail. Software engineering experience predicts that it
won't work just-like-that with Tinymail; it will probably require
changes outside the providers as well etc.. Still, the hardest part of
Exchange support has been solved. 

Now, to come back to your question - the MAPI/WebDav support is not
there now, and I don't think there is *plan* right now. If you really
want it, you'll need to do the porting of the Evo providers yourself, or
ask someone else to do it for you.

If you don't want to do that, you can access Exchange servers using IMAP
just fine (though you won't get calendar info in any useful way); as long
as the Exchange admins enable IMAP.

Best wishes,
Dirk.