Linux and Exchange 2007

[knight187]

I have been crawling through google for months trying to find a way to have my Linux (Ubuntu) PC connect to our company Microsoft SBS 2008 server running exchange 2007. Finally I have a working solution. I am using a program called DavMail (http://davmail.sourceforge.net). This little application is absolutely fantastic!!! I can run Thunderbird from my Ubuntu workstation with access to exchanges email, calendar, tasks and contacts.

DavMail uses Exchanges OWA to retrieve email, calendar, tasks and contacts. Its available Linux or Windows. The first time I set it up I installed it on my Ubuntu workstation. It worked well but was quite slow to retrieve information. If you don't have admin access to your windows server installing it locally would be your only option. I, on the other hand have admin access to our company SBS server so I installed the windows version on SBS and found the experience much more responsive, I guess the bottle neck is when DavMail accesses OWA.

Anyway I though I would document the steps I have takes to setup my workstation access to exchange 2007 because it was quite frustrating trying to find a solution that works as well as this.

Step 1. Install Thunderbird with the Lightning extensions.

Step 2. Download and install DavMail.

Option 1) Install DavMail on your local PC, this option works but is not recommended because the speed is a bit slow. If you don't have admin access to your windows server and your windows sysadmin is a tool, then this is the only way I have found to access exchange reliably from Ubuntu. (there is an exchange 2007 add-on for evolution but I couldn't get it to work, just kept crashing and I'm not a huge fan of evolution).

Option 2) Install DavMail on your Exchange Server, I found that this works a lot faster and if you have more then 1 workstation wanting to use DavMail then they can all connect to the one instance of DavMail running from your Windows server.

When DavMail is installed and run as an application the only thing you need to do is configure the URL for your exchange OWA, if your running it from your workstation the the URL would be something like https://excahnge.server.local/owa. If your setup is like mine I used the URL of https://localhost/owa because I am running DavMail from our Exchange server so other non windows users can access their exchange calendars, tasks, contacts, etc. We even have 2 guys running OSX and they can access their calendars etc. from their workstations. (I think exchange support for OSX will be built into the OS in the next major release).

After you have configured the URL the next thing to do is to configure the ports that each of the services will run from, I like to try and leave things as simple as possible so I left the defaults in place but after undergoing one of the many reboots our SBS Server needs DavMail refused to to start saying that port 1025 was in use by another process, so I had to change the port to 1125. I would recommend unticking any of the unwanted ports, for example I have no use for POP3 or IMAP as exchange supports these protocols by default and the end user experience is better using the exchange version of these protocols. If you don't have access to your exchange server to enable these protocols then your left to use the DavMail ports which work but are a bit slow if you have a lot of email. My exchange mailbox if over 2gig so sucking that down through OWA was painfully slow, however using the native exchange IMAP it was fine.

Step 3. Configure Thunderbird

Email.
I am using native exchange IMAP for my email in Thunderbird, there is no tricks to setting this up, its pretty standard, I am using ssl on port 993 so my email is sent encrypted over the company network (if the security is their you should use it).

In my config I am using IMAP for my email on my workstation and using the exchange (activesync) protocol to access my mailbox from my iPhone. The problem I was having was when I deleted an email from my workstation (IMAP) the email would still show as being in my inbox on my iPhone until I purged my email from Thunderbird. This is not a hard thing to do just right click on the folder you have deleted the email from and select compact. But really... Who is going to remember to do that every time they delete an email or leave there PC. So I went back and asked Google for a solution and sure enough Google has the answer...

In Thunderbird:
Edit -> Account Settings -> Server Settings -> "when i delete a message" Move it to the Trash folder.

Then:
Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Config Editor -> mail.imap.expunge_after_delete = True

then when you delete an email from your inbox it will be moved to the Trash and deleted from the inbox. Perfect.

Note: I keep only emails that I am currently working on in my inbox so I never really have more then about 20 emails in my inbox at any one time, I think doing this make working with IMAP a little more friendly. If you have a few years backlog of email in your inbox your Thunderbird seems to run a bit slow (but I am using an old POS PC).


Calendar.
Ok this is where it get interesting, to add a calendar to Thunderbird is really easy just click Calendar from the file menu and select "New Calendar" then "On then Network" then CalDav and in the Location enter

"http://exchange.server.local:1080/users/user@example.com/calendar"

It took me a few days to figure out that who ever setup our exchange server setup my email address with a capital letter for my email address eg. User@example.com instead of user@example.com. The CalDav location string is case sensitive so be sure to type it all correctly or it won't work.

Now you should have Email, Calendar and Tasks working in Thunderbird. All that is left is contacts.


Contacts.
So far I can't get contact to display but I can search for them and the auto complete when typing email address in the to, cc, etc section works. To setup contacts in Thunderbird goto

Edit -> Preferences -> Composition -> Addressing -> Directory Server -> Edit Directories -> Add

Name: (I called mine exchange)
Hostname: excahnge.server.local
Base DN: ou=people
Port Number: 1389
Bind DN: domain\user

Then OK.

ALL DONE. you should now have a pretty nice user experience connecting to exchange 2007 from Linux.

[Xirtambus]

It WORKED!

I cannot tell you how long I struggled with evolution to try make that ******* evolution plugin work with MAPI over SSL. This works around it. Thank you. So much! Goodbye evolution!

If I could formally thank you for this post I would, but I can't find the button...

[jctweb]

I have been crawling through google for months trying to find a way to have my Linux (Ubuntu) PC connect to our company Microsoft SBS 2008 server running exchange 2007.

Same here - can't find anything solid that actually works

If you don't have admin access to your windows server installing it locally would be your only option. I, on the other hand have admin access to our company SBS server so I installed the windows version on SBS and found the experience much more responsive, I guess the bottle neck is when DavMail accesses OWA.

I, on the other hand, do not have admin access.

I will keep looking and see what I can find. I think my problem is that I'm trying to access the exchange server through an exchange proxy (outlook anywhere) and it just doesn't want to play nice

[knight187]

Same here - can't find anything solid that actually works

I, on the other hand, do not have admin access.

I will keep looking and see what I can find. I think my problem is that I'm trying to access the exchange server through an exchange proxy (outlook anywhere) and it just doesn't want to play nice

My Exchange skills are pretty poor, in fact almost non-existent but I will try and understand your problem and offer a solution. From my understanding (and feel free to tell me I am wrong) is that Outlook Anyware uses RPC over HTTPS so port 443 should be open to your exchange server, if this is the case then you "should" be able to access OWA (Outlook Web Access) if your windows admins have set it up. I would have thought that if you install DavMail on your Linux desktop then you can configure Davmail to access https://exchange.fqdn/owa. But I haven't tried to access OWA through an exchange proxy (I don't even know what an "exchange proxy" is)

Anyway if this is no help at all the DavMail author runs a mailing list and is pretty good at answering questions and is quite quick to respond.

Please let us know if you figure it out. Good Luck,
Cheers.

[jctweb]

I think I'll check out DavMail.

In case you're curious...

My company's exchange server is accessed via our LAN; you're supposed to be authenticated against Active Directory prior to accessing email..

On the other hand...there's a feature called "Outlook Anywhere" which allows us to access our exchange server from home - without using a VPN connection into the corporate network.

The way it works is through what's called an exchange proxy

PC -> exchange proxy (public) -> AD authentication -> exchange server

Interestingly enough, our OWA subdomain is also acting as the proxy.

My problem is that when I set up Evolution's Exchange MAPI connector (not related to this thread, per se) using the OWA address, it times out and doesn't quite work. When I try to get to the pseudo-public IP and/or DNS name of the actual exchange server, it also times out.

In a nutshell, I'm willing to bet that I could access Exchange using my Ubuntu machine if I was hooked into the company network directly. Since I'm not, I fear that I may be stuck using webmail (OWA) or a virtual machine w/Office 2k7 installed.

[mr_raider]

Anyone found a way to sync contacts? Not just lookup in the GAL.

[Xirtambus]

Same here - can't find anything solid that actually works

I, on the other hand, do not have admin access.

I will keep looking and see what I can find. I think my problem is that I'm trying to access the exchange server through an exchange proxy (outlook anywhere) and it just doesn't want to play nice

To clarify, I used the local install option and it worked. You don't need to make any changes to your company's box.

[Amilo1718]

Thanks I will try the Thunderbird/DavMail instead of the non-working Evolution...

[pcarneiro]

Hello all!

I was thinking if anyone could help me understand some problems and how to solve it.
first off all, I started using Ubuntu a couple weeks ago. Used windows for more than 15 years!
Just loving Linux.

The thing is, our company has a SMBS 2008, with OWA 2007.
so, in ubuntu the email options would be Evolution or Thundirbird.
First tried Evolution, but I got some problems sending e-mail and it got bloqued frozen times. (used Evolution MAPI Exchange protocol)

Now I started trying thindirbir conected to OWA 2007 with DAVMAIL (great tool), but the thing is, some times it works, other times i get all kind of errors from davmail, ssl error, 404 error, etc. by no reason it works again, and after a couple minutes e stops working and i get the errors again.

its not stable.

other thing I notice, many times davmail just loses al the setings, and i have to configure it all again: url, smtp, imap, etc.

any ideas?

i'am really stucked with this, and this is the last step for me to leave windows and go for linux.

Apreciate any help,

Best regards,
pcarneiro

[!nkubus]

Wow It worked.

You made my day, I was tired of the ugly webmail, and always found Evolution Clunky.


It would be awesome if ths would support ISA/RSA auth forms, This would allow me to take my emails everywhere, since outside of my work the webmail is protected with an RSA/ISA vpn form.