An ‘orrible Question: Outlook 365 Under Wine On CentOS?

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Either CentOS 6 or 7 – anyone know if it’s possible?

Upper Management has decided on a policy that IMAP is going to go away in the near future, and they want everyone on Lookout, sorry, Outlook 365.

mark, VMNH*

* Very Much Not Happy

24 thoughts on - An ‘orrible Question: Outlook 365 Under Wine On CentOS?

  • When my folks decide something like that it will be time to look for new job ;-(

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • Oh you poor boy. Outlook sucks rocks.

    We’re now using outlook 365 at my place of employment (formerly we ran our own exchange server(s)). but we’re also all forced to have a real windows-on-metal system at our desks, so it’s not a major hardship.

    they (the management) require windows on real hardware, not in a VM
    so I have two computers at my desk since I do all my actual work on Linux. it’s a waste of company money, at the very least.

  • If I understand correctly Outlook affair: you are the one to run the server. There are some principles to work with professionals, one of which is: do not tell professional which tools to use, and how to do his job. Now, either your decision maker doesn’t consider you a professional, or he doesn’t care to work with professional right way. Either way, the outcome will be bad, sorry for such prediction. That’s why _probably_ I would start looking for new job. As, as all of us know, when one of two people is to go, the boss stays.

    There are open source alternatives to MS Outlook I was about to mention, but I wouldn’t expect in your situation those to be of any help. My condolences…

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • What you are being moved to may be a different m$ service offering, but their “outlook.office365.com” service, while exchange focused, supports imap and standards-based clients.

  • Working with these expert and highly knowledgeable folk must be an incredibly challenge :-(

    Obviously brain-washed by Microsoft’s marketing team.

    Commiserations.

  • The only linux-based client that, if I recall, can speak native MS mail protocols, was Evolution.

    I don’t know if it still does.

  • Mark,

    While we still run an EXIM service for the bulk of the company, I do have it happily co-existing with a small (15 user) Office 365 setup.

    Personally I am using a CentOS 7 laptop but my emails are handled by connecting via SSH to an old Fedora 8 box running KDE and KMail.

    This connects perfectly happy with my Dovecot/EXIM local server and to my Office 365 account also using IMAP/SMTP.

    Contrary to what others have said on here, it is actually a solution that is working quite well for us with a mixture of Macbook / iphone / ipad / Galaxy phone / Windows PC / Linux PC.

    Certainly for the mobile users it’s a much better solution.

    (it’s okay, I’m going to sit down in a darkened room now to recover)

    :-)

    Gary

  • John Jasen wrote:
    Yeah… and this is O365.

    Stupid question: if I check out evolution… will it munge my thunderbid email inbox or folders, or could it read them, and just create its own indices?

    mark

  • Hi, Gary,

    Gary Stainburn wrote:

    You’re not the only one who’s responded this way. As I said in my original post, I am given to understand that They have decided on a Policy to
    *stop* enabling IMAP. If that was left running, I’d be running just what I
    am now, IMAP to Exchange.

    mark

  • If they’re both reasonably well-behaved mail clients, they should generally leave each other alone. I’ve not had major issues doing Exchange or OWA from one client, and IMAP from thunderbird — but I’ve not tried evolution in a LONG time.

  • –uWuornoA5R2oFrPjsq41xgAmhbDpGMabd Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

    For a previous job, I was using davmail (http://davmail.sourceforge.net)
    to act as a imap/caldav/ldap gateway between my Thunderbird and the OWA. I never tested against outlook365 but a simple google search seems to indicate that it’s doable/working

    Just my two cents ..

  • Fabian Arrotin wrote:
    From UWisconsin: “Office 365 does not support calendar standard (CalDAV)”. And, actually, I don’t care about *anything* but simple mail reading. When I need to use the calendar, such as scheduling days off, I use the web acces. But trying to go through a couple hundred emails a day (lots of workstations and servers, lots of logfile emails) is going to kill me.

    I dunno. Thanks, Fabian.

    mark

  • –DMl9DHmm2qSdxSWhs4W06gAhFcfVqBEWB
    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

    Well, if you read what davmail is you’ll see that *it* acts as a caldav/imap/ldap gateway to OWA (which doesn’t provide this) :-)
    So that means that you configure you MUA (even mutt if you like) as normal IMAP client pointing to davmail, which itself then uses OWA as backend … As said, I used this for my previous job (~2 years) and the only thing I
    had to do was to reload it from time to time because java (yeah) .. and memory leaks (but I was automating that through networkmanager dispatcher.d script, as my laptop was never powered off – only suspending/resuming – except for kernel updates)

    YMMV

  • Fabian Arrotin writes:
    […]

    Going through various stages of the corporate email outsourcing craze with different versions of Exchange, I have never ever gotten davmail to work. Never tested it with o365, and don’t care as long as they don’t cancel imap here. Don’t see that happening, however.

  • –BdVXLGTdMTgInLMuBoMskQPM8GpvKKqjc Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

    Office 365 (including outlook) has a web client for Mail and Calendar.

    I use both with firefox and chrome on CentOS-7.

    I don’t use either the Calendar or the Mail enough to have cared about accessing it any other way than the web client.

    –BdVXLGTdMTgInLMuBoMskQPM8GpvKKqjc

  • accessing it any other way than the web client.

    Yes, I guess the OP got many of us confused as to what the high brass decision in his company is:

    1. Is it IMAP server (and whatever calendar server) is (are) to be replaced by MS Exchange server,

    or

    2. Clients have to use MS Outlook (is there requirement to have integrated server side calendar part so users can send embedded event invitations from the Outlook mail/calendar/(whatever else) clients?)

    1. is clear, UNIX servers are to go, and MS certified sysadmin will be hired soon to run exchange server.

    2. Can depend on what high brass order exactly is. I do have a bunch of users who use outlook configured to talk to my IMAP servers. And others mention the same. I do believe there exists open source counterparts to what MS Exchange server does (collabsuite pops up in my mind…). But running that in this situation would be PITA. The ones I’ve seen normally need their own client side application. Even if Outlook client will work with them (fully, not as just as IMAP client), then there is fair chance closed source/ closed “standards” MS client will stop working after some MS update or version of client upgrade. And with MS you can not avoid doing update, update, update… so going that route is planting time bomb under yourself. Bottom line: even if it just decision 2, MS Exchange server is what it ultimately will lead to.

    In other words, my semi-humorous first assessment: when you hear this decision it is time to search for new job, is probably the only viable one. Or, take paid leave and go through full blown MS training and certification. Yes, certification is more valuable than your ability in MS
    admin community in my observation! But as always, this is OP assessment and decision that matters as he will be the one dealing with consequences.

    Do not shoot the bad news messenger ;-(

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • Valeri Galtsev wrote:
    in the near future, and they want everyone on Lookout, sorry, Outlook
    365.

    decision in his company is:
    replaced by MS Exchange server, integrated server side calendar part so users can send embedded event invitations from the Outlook mail/calendar/(whatever else) clients?)
    hired soon to run exchange server.

    You’re overthinking it, Valeri. This US gov’t agency (which I work for as a contractor), has (after much work in other directions, has apparently thrown them out, who knows, they may change their (alleged) minds again), and trust me, all of the *Nix servers here, that are doing *serious*
    scientific research, are not going away. The mail system has been Exchange all along, but with deciding to go to Oriface 365, they have determined a policy that with that migration, they are going to *not* *run* IMAP (they could if they wanted to). Without IMAP, I’m going to have to either
    a) bring in the laptop that runs WinDoze (that sits at home for emergencies),
    and is theirs, and run that to read my freakin’ email (and I
    suppose I’ll
    need synergy for when I have to copy and paste)l
    b) run the damn webmail client, which would impact my productivity by
    15%-20%,
    given that I normally deal with over 200 emails per day (2/3rds log files
    from out loghost, or logcheck). Webmail will make it take probably twice
    as long to deal with, or
    c) find a way to install and run Lookout, er, Outlook 365 under wine, or whatever.

    Now, not that I haven’t been annoyed at t-bird for several years now, but webmail or outlook would be miserable… and I don’t remember if webmail lets me search, etc.

    Does this make more sense? And, as I said, I really like, and am proud, of working where I do (this *is* civilian sector), and like most of the folks I’m working with, a number of whom I count as friends, and, well, I only need low-power binoculars, not a large reflecting telescope to see retirement headed my way, so I do *not* want to jobhunt.

    mark

  • Two replies here.

    Firstly, the web client does work quite well. It’s a VERY convenient way of getting to your emails when off-site / no laptop etc. It seems to work best in Chrome on my Fedora and CentOS boxes, but I hate how Chrome tried to take over your PC. Mine for example even changes the volume of my music (using squeezelite connected to a Squeezebox, so I can monitor the background music played in our showrooms)

    Secondly, I’ve used VirtualBox extensively for testing purposes (I use LAPP
    for the servers but all of the client PC’s run Win7 / IE)

    Even on a relatively small sized desktop PC, the performance hit of having Win7 inside a VM as well as everything else I do isn’t a biggy. To be fair though, all I use my desktop for other than running the VM is to SSH to other boxes.

    I know you said that your bosses want stuff running on physical kit, but it could be argued that it’s a small compromise.

    Ignoring everything on this thread, my first course of action would be to challenge the decision, although you may have already done that.

    Gary

  • Office365 is a bit flaky in places but works perfectly well as an IMAP
    server to any email client. The calendar functionality is not there via IMAP however so you wont get notified if you get invited to meetings. Be it on your head!

    From a business perspective Office365 is an extremely good choice for a company using mostly windows or mac. Its pretty seamless. The web client has much improved recently and honestly the office integration is kinda awesome. Flakyness aside; the M$ still very much holds first place over OSX, Gnome & KDE on desktop features and user experience.

  • Hi,

    I’ve used Davmail against sExchange in the past, with success. If that doesn’t work for you, then the easy way out is webmail which is decent, in fact I have colleagues prefering it to the standard Outlook program. Office365 does offer IMAP though and it works reasonably well, I use it with Thunderbird, hopefully they won’t disable that – wonder as to the reason of it.

    hth

  • This is seriously weird… note the date I made the original post….

    Nux! wrote:

    I may look into it, in my copious spare time. Since I posted, they migrated us, and I’ve used the Outlook webmail. Pardon me while I go worship the porcelain throne.

    They *did* disable IMAP. “Policy”… aka, as Bruce Schnier says, “security theater”

    mark