Evolution-mapi working or not?

[abhi.datt]

If I follow the steps sent by Kaya, I get no errors but when I launch Evolution wizard, all Forward buttons are disabled. Is anyone else facing this issue??

Oops! I missed this completely
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...5&postcount=61

[rchille]

All right! I have Evolution tied to Exchange via the 0.28.1 plugin.

I can send/receive email, however, I'm missing calendar and GAL support. The calendar shows nothing though tracing through the logs evolution can "see" to entires:

|---+ Calendar        : (Container class: IPF.Appointment 1D9894311D000001) UnRead : 0 Total : 2 size : 5657

Whenever I go to add an entry to the Calendar I get a "Unable to open the calendar: Calendar" message in a pop up.

GAL is just blank.

Any suggestions?

[MrSqueezles]

All right! I have Evolution tied to Exchange via the 0.28.1 plugin.

I can send/receive email, however, I'm missing calendar and GAL support.

I haven't gotten calendar working reliably. Some meetings show up, but others don't. If I accept any calendar invitations or try to add an event, things disappear or shift around. I've been using web mail for meetings (painful) and Evolution for everything else.

The address list is very, very slow and can take 10 to 30 seconds to show up at first. Performing searches is relatively fast, though. It didn't show up for me at all until I rebooted for the first time after installing through the instructions I described before.

Actually, now that I've thought about it. The calendar didn't work at all either until I had rebooted once.

[jmarks]

After following the instructions posted above, I have successfully tied Evolution to Exchange via the 0.28.1 plugin.
I can authenticate to the server and see all my folders. There is a major problem, however, with accessing email messages: I can read any new message once. The problem is that, with some messages, accessing them a second time in the Inbox shows the headers, but no email message. The text box containing the message is not shown.

Exiting and restarting Evolution and reconnecting to the server does refresh the list of messages, but does not change the status of those messages for which the only the headers remain.
Accessing my mailbox through the web owa interface shows those "missing" messages to be intact.
Is there a way to get Evolution to access those missing messages again?

Two other smaller issues:
1. sent emails in the Outbox do not show to whom they were sent.
2. When I reviewed an email I sent in the Outbox, I found that it was presented in Japanese. (I typed it in English). Accessing the same email via the web interface does, in fact, show it in Japanese, so I suspect that was how it was encoded and sent. A subsequent email I sent was in Englsh and encoded correctly.

Has anyone had these experiences, or can suggest ways to debug this? Worthy of bug reports?
thanks!

[devinfriday]

Hi,

After following the instructions posted above, I have successfully tied Evolution to Exchange via the 0.28.1 plugin.
I can authenticate to the server and see all my folders. There is a major problem, however, with accessing email messages: I can read any new message once. The problem is that, with some messages, accessing them a second time
in the Inbox shows the headers, but no email message. The text box containing the message is not shown.

I am in the same situation as you, except, the missing body happens only for some mails (sent from the same guy!!!).

Exiting and restarting Evolution and reconnecting to the server does refresh the list of messages, but does not change the status of those messages for which the only the headers remain.
Accessing my mailbox through the web owa interface shows those "missing" messages to be intact.
Is there a way to get Evolution to access those missing messages again?

I hope so...

Two other smaller issues:
1. sent emails in the Outbox do not show to whom they were sent.
2. When I reviewed an email I sent in the Outbox, I found that it was presented in Japanese. (I typed it in English). Accessing the same email via the web interface does, in fact, show it in Japanese, so I suspect that was how it was encoded and sent. A subsequent email I sent was in Englsh and encoded correctly.

Not happened.. yet... but after a while my evolution client seems to "freeze" not allowing me to download new messages. Closing and restarting seems to work.
[/QUOTE]

I will be happy to provide further assistance to developers/debuggers to solve this.

[shrinkpad]

I really don't understand the thinking of Ubuntu here.

Perhaps it's openchange which is holding things up, but exchange compatibility (mail, calender, contacts, everything GAL based) is a lynch pin for most major companies porting their desktops to Linux. Like it or loath it, it's a fact that exchange is here to stay for the near future and if you work for a corp like me (telecoms) you have no choice but to use it.

When MAPI compatibility finally made it into a stable release their was a big fanfare on finally being able overcome this obstacle only for it to turn about to be a buggy, half functioning mess.

A year on I download 9.10 and expect to be able to configure an out of box exchange account, but instead I find users still struggling with different versions and finding half the functionality is still broke, some even resorting to compiling code from different sources.

If the technically minded such as us struggle to get this going, what the hell is the average user going to make of this?

Don't get me wrong this is no issue for a 'geek' who likes tweaking there workstation and hacking around, but for someone who wants to get on with a job, it's a right pain in the ***.

[jmarks]

I really don't understand the thinking of Ubuntu here.
When MAPI compatibility finally made it into a stable release their was a big fanfare on finally being able overcome this obstacle only for it to turn about to be a buggy, half functioning mess.

A year on I download 9.10 and expect to be able to configure an out of box exchange account, but instead I find users still struggling with different versions and finding half the functionality is still broke, some even resorting to compiling code from different sources.

I remain very discouraged. If you look at the evolution-mapi bugs reported, they seem to all be graded very low on the urgency scale. If I really want to commit to Linux than I need to run Windows as a virtual machine all the time, because there is no decent outlook mapi support. And then -- what's the point?

[shrinkpad]

I remain very discouraged. If you look at the evolution-mapi bugs reported, they seem to all be graded very low on the urgency scale. If I really want to commit to Linux than I need to run Windows as a virtual machine all the time, because there is no decent outlook mapi support. And then -- what's the point?

I feel you bro.

It's a joke it ever made stable. For near on 5 years I have walked around with dual boot laptops at work..I try and so desperately want to use Ubuntu, but's it's to painful using outlook web access when I get project managers sending invites for conference calls all day long in a packed out calendar.

It's better to just go back to using XP where I have the lot working and indexed by google desktop.

Granted a lot of the issue originates in the fact that MAPI is closed source, but that argument can no longer wash when you tend a product to the commercial sector with promises of full MS intergration (namely exchange).

[HDave]

The openchange group that created the mapi library is working off of the publicly documented web services API from Microsoft, so no excuses there. Their progress is steady, but nearly glacial.

The Evolution plug-in on top of the openchange stuff is just plain terrible.

I gave up waiting and caring about a year ago.

In my particular case, I set up a Funambol server to sync contacts and calendar between Exchange & Thunderbird/Evolution/etc and am using IMAP for emails. The side benefit is there are hundreds of mobile phones with native sync to Funambol (which is open source).

[kaput]

I'm a recent hire (1 week) for a company with Exchange 2007. With the recent evolution-mapi 0.28.2 release, I'm able to get connected and things seem to be working.

However, people need to be sure to not be hitting a stand-alone OWA front-end. The evolution-mapi connector won't work without back-end access.

While I've not had time to fully explore potential issues, I have noticed that while the calendar does work it doesn't seem to be syncing/showing recurring appointments.