Use Evolution with Microsoft Exchange : Ubuntu (6.06 / 6.10)
My office, in its infinite wisdom, decided that Microsoft Server 2003 was the best investment they could make. Well, I’m sure most of you understand why I think that’s probably the worst idea in the world but, on the bright side, at least I don’t have to use Outlook .
I am using Evolution to connect to the Exchange Server and everything works just fine. As far as I know it is the ONLY program (Windows or *nix) that will work with Exchange, except for Outlook or Outlook Express. For those of you that have to deal with another of Microsoft’s joke of a product here is how you can use Evolution to access your mailbox.
In Evolution select Edit > Preferences > Accounts > New
- Identity: Set your basic information here. Name, email address, reply-to, etc.
- Receiving Email:
Server Type: "Microsoft Exchange"
Username: domain/username (ie; your windows domain and user account)
OWA URL: The URL for your office / domain webmail. (ie; https://webmail.domain.com/exchange/)
Authenticate: Use this to verify the information is correct for your system
Receiving Options: GAL / Active Directory settings. This is the local config that you'd use to setup Outlook on-site. (This is optional. Mainly used for company calendar and contacts.)
I have been using this for months now and I don’t have any trouble. Occasionally it complains about not being able to access the calendar or company contacts but I’m fairly sure that is the fault of the Exchange Server itself (it, as you might guess, is fairly unreliable).
I would much rather use Evolution to access my office email (and I also use it to retrieve my gmail and other accounts). Before I set this up I simply used the webmail interface. I refuse to use Outlook. I hope this is helpful and anyone else needing to connect to an Exchange Server can use a reliable Linux app to do it.
I’m sure this would be more helpful if I included some screenshots but I don’t have the time for that just now. Feedback is appreciated on how I can better outline the steps. It isn’t too difficult once you have the right information, but finding that is tricky sometimes.