MS Exchange Email & Calendar with Evolution

Read email from MS Exchange without IMAP. Optionally, use Exchange calendar too. All from comfort of your Linux.

For email, administrator should just enable IMAP on Exchange server. Problem solved, mail readable with any email client: Thunderbird, Mutt, KMail. Or even better, use free email server like Dovecot and Qmail.
If your IT department is going out of their way to prevent using Free software, don’t worry. You can still read email with Evolution.
This article describes a setup that worked in a network. I just made it work and documented my setup, I haven’t thoroughly tested these instructions.  By purposefully disabling standard protocols, your IT department can of course make this arbitrarily difficult.
Prequisites: command line, TCP/IP networking

Collect information

On a Windows machine with working Outlook, log on. Notice your user name, (e.g. TERO), and your domain (eg. NOFREEDOM).
Read your email with outlook.

C:\ netstat -n

Notice your Exchange server IP number. It’s serving 4001/tcp and probably 4002/tcp.

Configure Evolution

$ sudo apt-get -y install evolution evolution-mapi

Start evolution. If you had it running already, close & start it again to enable MAPI support.
Account wizard starts. This same information can be modified later on Account Editor: Receiving Email.

Server Type: Exchange MAPI
Server: 192.168.0.5
User Name: TERO
Domain name: NOFREEDOM
Use secure connection: Yes
Kerberos authentication: No

For “Server”, use your networks mapi server address from windows netstat. Domain name didn’t work for me, it had to be numeric.
For “User Name”, “Domain Name” and password, use values you tested by logging into Windows.
Click Authenticate, type your password. If you are lucky, you are in!

Enjoy & Demand Change

You should be looking at your email. To see your calendar, just click calendar icon on the bottom of left pane.
Now write an email to your IT department and ask them to enable standard IMAP protocol.

Administrivia

Tested with Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, Evolution 3.2.3-0ubuntu6, evolution-mapi 3.2.2-1, libmapi0 1:1.0-1. (cat /etc/lsb-release, dpkg –list evolution evolution-mapi libmapi0).