On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 12:10 PM, Chris Schanzle <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 02/09/2015 01:40 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
>>
>> My university IT department, external to any academic or research unit,
>> has made the arbitrary decision to force us to use a Microsoft Office365
>> external distributed proprietary (cloud) service for official university
>> email.  Although this service nominally supports IETF SMTP and IMAP
>> protocols, it is abysmally slow when so doing. The campus IT spokesperson
>> has explained that only a client compliant with Microsoft ActiveSync will
>> fully function with this imposed proprietary closed system service --
>> translation:  if one wants reasonable speed in email, use an ActiveSync
>> client -- probably from Microsoft.
>
>
> I think your campus IT spokesperson is wrong, or you are not paying enough
> to get good service. :-)

From direct experience with such email clients and Linux and Mac
clients, they're quite right. It won't have "full service" unless it
has access to the calendar and addres list functions. A pure IMAP
solution, as some of us prefer, also won't have the "click on the
group email address and have it expanded to all the group members
automatically" function. That's why saying "it won't have full
service" is weasel words.

The OWA or Outlook Web Application used by various clients and by most
cell phone applications for Exchange of any flavor is basically web
scraping. It can get you *most* functionality, but it's never going to
work as well as a native Windows client.