I appreciate the various replies, some of which have been off-list.

One such off list is:

[Entity X} is not yet on the ActiveSync client but
we have been using MS Exchange 2010 for a few years now.
the linux IMAP clients were at first problematic but eventually they
sorted them all out and there are plenty of people who still use
thunderbird to read their mail without significant trouble except
the server getting confused every once in a while.  I think you
can expect that office365 cloud-based email, which my wife's university
already uses, will work out the imap kinks in the next bug release or two.

End quote.

This is a SL issue in that if SL is to be used in the real world as both 
a workstation and as a server environment,
one needs workstation applications that communicate/interoperate with 
those commonly available from other environments
(the two primary examples being proprietary MS Windows and highly 
proprietary Mac OS X -- albeit the latter has BSD internals
and thus can be adapted to open standards -- in addition to the various 
"smart phone", tablet, and device environments such
as Android or IOS).

Fully function is not a weasel word -- it means that if a set of 
services are available from some service or application -- then all of 
these functions can be accessed with equivalent results as if the 
"native" proprietary application were used.  Evidently,
using IMAP and SMTP -- open public IETF standards -- work, but very 
slowly, with the current MS Office365 email service.
The web based interfaces are slow as well.  This leaves us with the only 
alternative -- until MS works out the Office365 cloud based email imap 
"kinks" in the next few maintenance minor releases ("bug releases").  I 
am not holding my breath in that MS may view this as a method to force 
linux out of the USA professional/commercial workplace.

Yasha Karant

On 02/09/2015 06:03 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 1:40 AM, Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]> 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.
>
> It's better than some, and a lot more robust than many IT department's
> internal services. I've seen Linux favoring shops fail to maintain
> complex email services, and especially calendar functions, and had
> their client company finally throw in the towel and switch to
> Office365 or GMail. And be clear, this is not a "Scientific Linux"
> problem, it's a "my company chose to use a hosted, commercial, closed
> mail server, and I need to deal with it".
>
> If it does straightfoward IMAP, then any of the dozens of built-in
> IMAP capable clients should work for email access, including the
> default "evolution" product in SL  And there are hundreds of good web
> guidelines for "evolution" access to Office365: look around.
>
> What you won't get with a pure IMAP client such as my old favorite
> "pine" or other pure IMAP clients, is access to the user address
> search engines, calendar functions, integrated address books, etc.,
> etc. Those matter to some folks, especially if you need to book a
> meeting room and can only use the Exchange clients to do so.
>
> Part of the problem is the weasel words "fully function".  Any client
> that wants to deal with the upstream office365 server is typically
> webscraping the webmail access. That webmail access tends to *suck* in
> terms of performance, especially with complex and bulky email systems.
> It's why even I maintain a Windows environment with an Outlook client:
> I find that waiting a full minute for a new filter to be enabled and
> waiting.... waiting.... waiting to get a refreshed screen to work with
> is unacceptable, and the web based access to Office365 has been
> unacceptable for me. But I hammer my email with many alert and
> notification systems and cron job reports.
>
>> Is there any such client (Microsoft or otherwise) available for Linux, and
>> in particular, SL 7?  All that I found on the web is to use proprietary
>> Microsoft Outlook under a MS Windows environment under a virtual machine
>> (e.g., VirtualBox) under Linux -- not a solution I want for regular email
>> service.
> See above. Start from "evolution", which is a popular and well
> supported client in RHEL and in SL  and work your way out to a client
> that works as well as you can expect.
>
>> For anyone currently using (by force or choice) Microsoft ActiveSync, does
>> it in fact support the functionality of IMAP and SMTP without staying
>> completely with a Microsoft proprietary environment, including Microsoft
>> proprietary software applications?
> See above. It's that "fully functional" part that you might be missing
> with even the best IMAP clients.