Category Archives: Exchange

Connecting to Microsoft Exchange from Linux

DavMail, Exchange, Java

In our company we are all using Microsoft technologies. Working on Windows eight hours a day makes me a little sick, so when I work on PC at home I usually switch to Linux. But from time to time I need to access my work mail. We can use Outlook Web Access (OWA), but I don’t like the interface much.

I was looking for some alternative in Linux. The first I found is that Evolution has some package called evolution-mapi, but I was not able to make it work. It was probably caused by having old version of Evolution.

So I searched further and found a great tool called DavMail. It’s basically a gateway to OWA written in Java. It provides POP3, IMAP, SMTP and LDAP access to your Exchange. You can install it on your client computer and access it only from localhost, so there won’t be any security risks.

Outlook tasks cannot be accepted or declined when connecting to Exchange using IMAP

Exchange, IMAP, Outlook

A few days ago I was solving a problem in our company where we started using new Exchange server for testing. The server installed was Microsoft Exchange 2010.
We have faced a problem when we tried to connect to this server from our testing virtual machines where Microsoft Outlook 2003 was installed. This version of Outook is forbidden starting Exchange version 2010.
There was an easy solution for this. We set up e-mail account using IMAP instead of Exchange. But then another problem appeared. When I sent a task from one Outlook to another it was displayed as normal e-mail. I was not able to accept it or decline it.
I was looking to this problem on internet and have found similar problems being reported. But the solution in most case was to install latest Office service packs. But I already installed latest service packs.
Then I run across some hint that there could be problem on the server side. So I looked to the settings of Exchange and found out that I can change MIME format of the e-mail. I made it to be the same as for Exchange and Tasks started to work as expected.
To change to correct settings go to Exchange Management Console > Server Configuration > Client Access and there locate IMAP4.

0005-exchange-console 

On the IMAP4 Properties go to Retrieval Settings and change Message MIME format to TNEF (Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format).

0006-exchange-imap4