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.

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.

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?

Yasha Karant