MS Exchange compatible mail prograns

[Allblack]

Hi,

Is there a Outlook clone available for Linux? I have heard that evolution is really good but it requires a plugin that you need to pay for.

We are running exchange at work and If I want to use RH on my desktop I have to make sure I can connect to exchange. We have OWA running but I don't prefer to use a browser for my email.

cheers

[Dolda2000]

You only need the plugin to connect to exchange servers. Since that's what you want to do, there's no way around it, though. Noone has reverse-engineered the Outlook protocol yet, so Evolution is really the only UNIX program that can do it. The reason that you need to pay for the plugin is the Ximian had to license the protocol specs from M$ in order to make it. Therefore, they can't make the plugin open source; M$'s license prohibits it.

The best thing would, of course, be to make your IT department change to an open standard, like IMAP. ;-)

[Allblack]

The best thing would, of course, be to make your IT department change to an open standard, like IMAP.

I'll do that as soon as I am the manager
And I'll make you an offer to implement the changes...

[genlee]

Since my work uses exchange as well, I am forced to use outlook. On my laptop I run outlook from wine which works well. If your box has enough ram, you could always use vmware also for outlook. Dolda, for most companies, imap could not replace exchange since most of them are looking for a workgroup option. The calander and contacts folders are a very nice feature. I send out appointments almost daily through exchange. The contacts folder makes it very easy to find and retrieve info for a user. Having public folders and permissions is also very useful since it makes it easy to store/share certian emails. There is also so many clustering/fail over features which makes it extremely redundant. MS doesn't do many things right but exchange is one of the exceptions.

[Dolda2000]

Yeah, I figured that after I had written the post.

I haven't used these groupware things too much, but I always figured that those different folders just contain arbitrary data, and since IMAP stores (more or less) arbitrary data in folders, I figured that it should be possible to implement it over IMAP as well. I can't say that I've really looked into it, though, so I guess that could be wrong. Surely, there must be an open alternative, though? Otherwise, I sure think that the time has come to write one; maybe an IMAP extension?

[andutt]

I agree, iOutlook is the best thing winblowse have made, the calender is a moust have in my line of buisness...i also run evolution and its sad its doesnt support calender sharing for exchangeservers...but maybe its cooming up.

[genlee]

Suse has an openexchange server available for $1,249. It can do some of what exchange can but a lot of the good features like sending out appt's is still not there. It is basicly just an imap/smtp/ldap/webmail server for $1,249 which to me is a waste of money. Especially since they are just using cyrus imap, postfix, apache, and ldap to do it. You can get exchange standard edition for $699 which has way more features then openexchange.

[kpzani]

You can still collect email from exchange using any mail package its only the rest of the stuff that you have to pay for. Use evolution for email through exchange. and use the web front end provided by outlook web services through a browser for calendar and scheduling.