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.