Evolution MAPI Plugin on Ubuntu 9.04

Recently upgraded my laptop to the pre release Ubuntu 9.04 ( jaunty jackalope). One of the things I have been looking forward to is the Evolution MAPI plugin that is a result of work done by the Openchange project to implement MAPI stacks on both the client and server side. Evolution has been able to use Outlook Web Access for some time now as a back end, however this breaks when you are using Exchange 2007. So the MAPI plugin is currently the only hope for anyone who wants full email/calendar/GAL access in a open source mail client.

In Jaunty the evolution-mapi package is now available. After installing it a MAPI exchange account type is available. I attempted to setup my account numerous times providing my AD login, domain, password, exchange server fqdn etc… If I provided proper credentials it would seg fault, if I provide improper creds it would just error. It’s already logged as a bug. However if put in the IP address of the exchange server instead of the FQDN everything appears to work. A few people have reported this.

As of now I am able to read my exchange email in Evolution, I have yet to get GAL, Calendar or sending working. But eh progress is good.

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15 Comments

  1. Posted April 8, 2009 at 9:56 am | Permalink

    Fabulous, I didn’t think to try this, and indeed it does work! Thanks very much. I haven’t tried GAL or Calendar yet because the evolution mapi-plugin is currently eating up all my RAM “Fetching Summary Information”. I’m up to 1gb RAM usage so far, 60% through the Inbox :-)

    thanks again,
    Carl

  2. Posted April 16, 2009 at 9:40 am | Permalink

    Yeah my initial inbox update took quite a while as well.

  3. Posted April 17, 2009 at 9:06 am | Permalink

    Since I keep my inbox very clean, evolution-mapi worked NICELY for me and memory/cpu resources weren’t pegged. Now if I could figure out how to get GAL/calendar working I can ditch my Thunderbird/IMAP config and go back to Evolution’s all-in-one tool. I even have the Thunderbird calendar plugin integrated with Google Calendar. :-)

  4. Posted April 23, 2009 at 12:37 pm | Permalink

    this worked! now i’m just waiting for it to get all my mail (will probably take a while)

  5. Posted April 24, 2009 at 5:12 am | Permalink

    as for calendar support, i figured out how to get the GAL server info out of outlook but i still haven’t gotten it working in evolution. using gconf-editor i did notice that there was an typo error in the xml in /apps/evolution/addressbook for my mapi connection but after fixing it and messing with the values, still not working…

  6. Anon
    Posted April 25, 2009 at 6:15 am | Permalink

    9.04 fixed the Evolution Exchange 2007 OWA connector. It finally works !

  7. John
    Posted April 25, 2009 at 8:51 am | Permalink

    can someone confirm how the OWA is working and how it should be configured?

  8. Anon
    Posted April 26, 2009 at 8:03 am | Permalink

    My company recently upgraded to Exchange 2007 from 2003, which broke my OWA connector plugin in Evolution on Ubuntu 8.10. So upon upgrading from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04, I tried to get it working again. Using the add account wizard, I entered my email address, and OWA URL address as https://webmail.companydomail.com, and username, then clicked authenticate. After a few seconds the mailbox name is auto populated, which shows authentication worked. This was the step that previously failed when trying to connect to Exchnage 2007, so looks like it is finally fixed.

    By the way, I’ve had no luck with the exchange MAPI plugin, although I can authenticate, I can only see the Favorites folder, with no email folders. So for now I’ll stick with the OWA connector.

  9. Jelle
    Posted April 28, 2009 at 5:08 am | Permalink

    Anon,

    cool you got it working, the MAPI plugin works for my emails, not for my calendar en GAL. I still prefere the old method (OWA), but I don’t get it working:

    (evolution:6535): e-utils-WARNING **: GConf error:
    Type mismatch: Expected list, got string
    is the message i get.

  10. Isaac
    Posted May 5, 2009 at 7:45 am | Permalink

    Thanks for reporting on your results. I just tried this out today with similar results (using domain name-> segfault, using IP->success). As with others I am seeing huge ram usage while syncing my inbox (which admittedly is rather large). Also, its using ~20-40% cpu on a 2ghz C2D. I am wondering if this is a one time thing, or will it use this much ram (and cpu) whenever I open my inbox?

    I guess I’ll try and see what happens.

  11. Simes
    Posted May 6, 2009 at 2:02 am | Permalink

    I’ve got it working – sort of. Inbox and sub-folders display fine and fast. Biggest problem I have with it is that it seems to assume that all emails are from people within your organisation and when you reply it just puts their name in the ‘to:’ box. So it’s ignoring email addresses basically.

    To reply to an email you have to manually type in the email address (or get it from contacts/GAL etc) unless they are internal to your Exchange server. This seems a bit of a bug to me.

  12. Greg
    Posted May 13, 2009 at 8:12 am | Permalink

    I am having issues connecting to the exchange server.

    I am connecting to a hosted exchange server that uses RPC proxy connection. The method I connect using outlook is:
    Client Box
    Ubuntu 9.04
    samba4
    Evo 2.26.1
    Evo – MAPI 0.26.0.1

    Remote Exchange information
    exchange.servername.net -> no IP
    proxy server: rpc.servername.net -> have the IP
    ID: name@company.com

    I have the IP address for the rpc.servername.net, but not for the exchange.servername.net. I also do not have the port number for the connection.

    Does anyone know the syntax I would need to know to make the connection?

  13. henri
    Posted July 29, 2009 at 6:07 am | Permalink

    Thansk all for the info. Would you say that, if someone does not use Exchange, but just Outlook PST stand-alone there is no way to output pst content to Evolution?….

    Henri

  14. Posted July 6, 2010 at 4:19 am | Permalink

    googd thanks a lot,this is very useful!!

  15. Posted July 6, 2010 at 8:48 am | Permalink

    Great articles & Nice a site!!

One Trackback

  1. [...] an account is busted. Each time I’d go to authenticate, Evolution would simply crash. Then I found this post which suggested using the IP address instead of the host name, which actaully [...]

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