Linux Exchange Integration

Like many of us, most of the companies I work for have a Windows based environment. This implies that our mail is handled by Exchange. In many cases you can access the mail with IMAP, however some companies choose not to open up anything except the webmail (and OWA).

As you may know, Android has the possibility to do over the air sync of calendar,email and contacts using the Microsoft ActiveSync software. As Android is a Linux device with a Java layer on top. I already checked if I could extract the sources from the Android app. During my search I came across a small project called davmail . Davmail is a project written in Java that acts as a proxy for OWA. It connects to the OWA of your company and exposes the receiving of mails using an IMAP or POP interface. You can also send mails using standard SMTP. This will then be translated in a Active Sync call to send the actual mail. It also exposes your contacts and calendar. I’ve not yet managed to get the Calendar working but at least my mail is now working. Up until now I was always booting a Vmware. The only thing this VM would be doing was running Oultook.

Let’s hope these days are over and I can finally leave the Windows behind. (Not if it would be a Exchange 2010 at least the webinterface would be a RIA but as it’s still the 2007 edition not much rich GUI is available for Linux).

So everybody looking for an alternative give it a go and let me know, I’m pretty interested to hear what you think about it.

3 Replies to “Linux Exchange Integration”

  1. My approach is just to refuse. I have a perfectly functional email infrastructure of my own (that attracts plenty of spam too). I can’t imagine why I would want yet another email address, let alone one I can’t read using the infrastructure I’m comfortable with.

    Why do you need to interact with “exchange” at all?

  2. @Philip,

    If I always had to refuse a Job where Exchange was the default and everybody had to send an receive on my private mail, well I wouldn’t get much jobs.

    @Amedee
    I was actaully looking for a desktop mail client. For Android I just installed the stock Mail app not the default HTC one. The default mail app works much better!

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