We've had Office 365 as the university's official system for over a year now. It has been evolving and improving though I still do not like it. Many Uk universities use either that or Google's services, and the main reason is reduced costs and simplified service maintenance, as wellas keeping students happy by offering a cloud-based service with all the add-ons already mentioned in this thread.

I have found it reasonably, and increasingly, usable via the Outlook Web Application, thunderbird and mutt, under Linux. So I agree with those whose meesage has basically been 'Don't panic'

________________________________________
From: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Chris Schanzle <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 09 February 2015 17:10
To: Yasha Karant; [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: SL7 client for Microsoft ActiveSync

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. :-)

We moved to the vaporous 365 cloud about two years ago.  It has not been great.  They change stuff.  They move you to different 'pods'. They roll out changes to some pods and not others.  They change things based on our special auth requirements and other stuff, and it breaks occasionally.  Nearly always the web-based method works. Of course IE works best, but firefox works well enough also.

While thunderbird downloads all the mail, which in my case and others is 10's of thousands of emails ~6 GB, it will be slow.  But once synced, it is reasonably fast...certainly not as fast as having it local, but reasonable to use throughout the day.

Initially they did some serious throttling of "abusers" that dramatically impaired use while thunderbird downloaded messages (e.g., rejecting access to Sent folder when sending msgs...retry...retry...done), but that changed about a year ago. Sometimes, often near times of Thunderbird updates but not always, something decides to invalidate all my folders and a full redownload is needed.  Takes about half a day now, where before it was about a week, and thunderbird needed several restarts as something would abort and wouldn't recover.