I'm now aware of three protocols that Exchange has used: MAPI, EPW, and Microsoft Graph. Are all of these supported/commonly used in both on-premise and Office365 environments, are are some limited to one or the other?
Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support
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Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before Thunderbird, Eudora was fantastic. We ran it at a college I worked at for most of the staff and faculty, and it was a very sad day when Qualcomm shut it down.
Eudora had its own very distinct take on mail client UI. Many loved it. I never really got on with it, although I could use it. While the native codebase is probably too old to salvage now, there was a project to write a Eudora-style UI for Thunderbird as an add-on. That might be easier to revive for 21st century email. http://www.staroceans.org/wiki/A/Eudora_OSE https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/eudora_ose.ht…
I know people that used it because it was self contained for Windows if I remember correctly. I remember one person running the installation off of a Zip drive back in the 90's. I warned them that Zip disks like to randomly self destruct and he'd better be making backups.
Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support
#93Nice to see, but unfortunately it's not uncommon for orgs using Outlook/Office to disable Exchange client support and require use of the official clients. It's highly unlikely and maybe not even possible, but I'd like to see desktop and mobile mail clients implement some kind of workaround.
I've been using Outlook Lite on my phone for a long time because I don't want to give my employer admin rights in my phone, and I'm getting messages that that is now deprecated. I guess I'll go back to webmail in Firefox Mobile.
Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support
#94This is great news because the new version of Outlook is terrible. When the good old Win32 version goes away, everyone will be looking for an alternative.
Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support
#95While its been a long time since Ive used Thunderbird, I just wanted to take the time to publicly say thank you. Many HNers probably wont (or cant) remember the world of desktop mail clients but basically during the height of MSFT dominance there was only one real mail client: Outlook. Which Microsoft was starting to monetize heavily, ignore UX, and keep it windows only (cant blame them for that). Then Thunderbird ar…
> Many HNers probably wont (or cant) remember the world of desktop mail clients...
If there are people who have never used a desktop mail client, I will say you owe it to yourself to try one. Web clients suck compared to desktop clients, it's not even close between the two. Sticking with just the Gmail interface (or whatever) is so limiting; definitely give alternatives a shot if you haven't.
Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support
#96Microsoft could have effortlessly made it easier for others to implement integrations with Microsoft Exchange but they won't. They needed to make sure as many people as possible get vendor locked.
Imagine going to work, and having a meeting about how you can make it harder for your software to interoperate with other software. Or waking up in the morning and spending your day designing a proprietary protocol designed to prevent interoperability. That's just another day at Microsoft.
Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support
#97As former Exchange admin/Office365, it's using EWS (Exchange Web Services) which is being removed in October 2026 for Office365. So for most, this is extremely time limited. EDIT: EWS continues to be supported for on premises Exchange and is not scheduled for deprecation.
You'll recall how horrendous on prem Exchange updates could be. Surely the sheer amount of time involved was a nudge and nothing technical?
My tiny company had an on prem Exchange, migrated from GroupWise, and is now cloudy. I did all the migrations myself.
I have left things with our MX records pointing to on prem (Exim + rspamd + stuff) and relaying to MS 365 and a few IMAP daemons. If MS take the piss with licensing costs, I'll simply relay elsewhere and drop them.
Then I'll migrate my customers away. It'll take a while but it is not insurmountable.
FWIW: I use Evolution on my Kubuntu based gear to access M365 email. Wifey rocks Arch and I've deployed Evo on KDE there too.
Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support
#98I’d be more excited for thunderbird if it worked on an open source alternative to EXCHANGE SERVER. Firefox and thunderbird are clients. But it is time they launched servers as well. There might not be any advantage to another https server. But a new mail server with a new email client protocol would be exciting. And maybe a WebDAV server that Firefox could work with natively.
There are several open source mail server options available.
The only real new protocol is JMAP which is pretty good and I’d much rather more clients and servers support JMAP than create a new protocol altogether.
Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support
#99All facts aside, Thunderbird is portable, you can install it on usb and carry your mailbox in pocket, connect to any pc and access without touching host filesystem, if pc has internet browse new mails and all
i always carry it on pendrive with encrypted partition, and encryption software is also natively installed on usb, so no use of host pc for anything, mail or decryption
Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support
#100All facts aside, Thunderbird is portable, you can install it on usb and carry your mailbox in pocket, connect to any pc and access without touching host filesystem, if pc has internet browse new mails and all i always carry it on pendrive with encrypted partition, and encryption software is also natively installed on usb, so no use of host pc for anything, mail or decryption
Not just that, you have all your emails with you, even without internet, even when aws/azure/cloudflare/... fails, plus you can write replies and everything else while offline and just send/sync when you get internet access (eg. on a cheap flight with expensive wifi).
Many things don't need an app, a web site is enough (and they somehow force apps onto us), but email, especially with something like thunderbird is a great thing to have directly installed on your pc (or portable with you).