Microsoft Exchange Support in Mail App Is it required?

Apologies, I must have misunderstood something about your situation, or about the relationship between Outlook, Exchange and ActiveSync. I will just point out that in no way does my setup provide any phone/tracking data to Microsoft. The only data that goes to Microsoft in my setup is the specific calendar entries for my work calendar.that I create on my phone (which is what I want to happen). If that was not what you were after, then please ignore my post.
It is, of course, a valid point that Outlook is not FLOSS. I can see how my language may imply that, though that was not my intent. I was referring to the other software being FLOSS, with the understanding that most people know that Outlook is not FLOSS. I will edit so as not to confuse anyone.
EDIT: Oops, too late to edit the above post, evidently. We’ll just have to hope for the best…

Hi @GaelDuval,

Did you already make a final decision on this?

I’ve got to connect to a shared outlook account. Email can be done via IMAP but there’s no open source solutions in Android that I’ve found for the calendar and tasks, so if you’re going to put effort into it I think calendar and tasks are where you’d make the biggest impact.

Cheers :slightly_smiling_face:

Pls have a look here Microsoft Exchange Support in Mail App Is it required?

That’s the same thread as this one.

It would be nice to be able to use work emails without shelter and the Outlook app.

It wound be even nicer to use any app knowing that /e/ can intercept and disabled tracking and other leaks.

Have been toying for some time with moving to /e/, which looks really great. What has stopped me so far are the challenges with syncing /e/ with Exchange 365 (How to connect /e/ to Exchange365 server?). Sorry for only chipping in now with my two cents worth, had given up for some time, but am happy that @Manoj pointed me here to this discussion.

Even though this thread started about the email client, some posts included also other components Exchange brings along like calendar and address book, which would be great to include in the native sync as well, because Exchange comes as “package”. For me personally, it’s less about having Exchange emails on my phone. Rather syncing calendar, address book and tasks are essential for me. When testing /e/ on an old phone (/e/ 0.8-20200415…), I can find “Google”, but nothing comparable on Exchange under /e/'s Settings --> Accounts --> add account. Lineage OS has an “Exchange” account option (along google and a few others), which is at least for me a “one-stop-shop” for everything Exchange related. There I can select what to sync (in my case everything but email), which works great even with my employer’s Exchange 365 and its own sign-in infrastructure. I wish something would become part of /e/, as well, as this would be a game changer at least for me. I’d be surprised, if I am the only one in this situation who would like to see an Exchange 365 support beyond emails out of the box on /e/ without much tinkering or intermediaries like NextCloud.

As simple employee, I’m afraid, I don’t have much say in what kind of IT infrastructure my employer uses (Exchange 365, would have voted for FOSS alternatives if anyone had asked me :grinning:) and I think it’s highly unlikely that I can convince them to make money available for helping /e/, as @GaelDuval (and I & possible many more) would like to see…

(BTW, the out-of-the box blocking in /e/ of standard trackers in apps that was mentioned above sounds very interesting!)

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FWIW I add my vote to include default Exchange support, as I have several email accounts and alas two of them are Exchange (ActiveSync) based accounts.

I tried Purism’s Librem Mail app, but it requires a Librem account to actually use it. So I went ahead and registered, chose the free option, then the app kept crashing. So for me at least Librem email client is not a good solution.

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For the reference, unless disabled by organization’s administrator, O365 can be reached at
IMAP
Server name: outlook.office365.com
Port: 993
Encryption method: TLS
SMTP
Server name: smtp.office365.com
Port: 587
Encryption method: STARTTLS
iCAL : get a .ics link by sharing your calendar in O365 user settings

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I managed to sync my Office 365 Mails with K9 Mail successfully.
I also created a .ics link from my Office 365 settings and imported it to the nextcloud calendar.

Then in DAVx i synced the nextcloud calendar with etar.

So far so good. But, when i create a new calendar entry in Office 365, it will not be synced with etar.

Does anybody know why?

Thanks in advance
Philipp

Edit:
First I tried adding a new calendar, which didn´t sync.
Then I tried adding a new abonnement with the iCal .ics link and now it´s syncing as expected.

someone else using BlueMail? I have problem with the calendar since some time.

I need Exchange for my work mails. However CalDAVsynchronizer (proposed by @ecs) doesnt work for me, as we are not allowed to install software on our business notebooks.

Would like to avoid installing Gmail… and Nine, which is an alternative proposed by our IT, is too expensive…

You might have thought of this already, but perhaps if you explained what it was, your work system admin would install the CalDAVsynchronizer for you? I suppose depending on the nature of your business, it could be construed posing a threat to the security of data sent through it? I don’t know that much about it, but it doesn’t seem any more vulnerable than similar Microsoft or other tools for interacting with mobile. As far as how it affects my system, I’ve been using it for months and it’s pretty low-profile.

There used to be a ticket in the system on better Exchange integration in /e/, but I can’t find it anymore, I’m afraid (it was at https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/apps/AccountManager/issues/33, which now creates a 404). Thus, I’ve just created a new ticket at https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/backlog/-/issues/1331, which hopefully captures the issues others (@Russ, @Leon, @kelusia, @isa, @AllBall, @wolfbert ) and I seem to have. If it doesn’t, please add/comment.

Hi @pmeh1 the previous issues on this was closed. You can find it here. The chances are this will also be closed for the simple reason that we do not have the resources to get into the development here or at best marked for later development. I leave that decision to the development team.

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Just as an information for everyone that needs Exchange integration. At work we have MS Exchange, so in some way I have to access it (and no, I also can’t convince my employer to invest in a /e/ integration).
After a long research, I found Mail Wise (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.syntomo.email&hl=de ) for my Exchange Mail and the calendar connection included in it works quite well, but I did not manage to synchronize the contacts although it claims it would work. I used Aurora Store to install it as the built in shop did not show this app. According to Aurora Store, Mail Wise has four trackers: AppsFlyer, Flurry, two Google trackers.
I also tried Aqua Mail that offers Exchange Mail but does not connect calendar or contacts.
Anyway I would also strongly support that the system provides calendar and contacts sychronization but I understand this might be quite some work as there don’t seem to be open libraries for this.

Exchange email can be accessed with default /e/ Mail app using IMAP, if enabled by your Exchange administrator. Links are in OWA.

Exchange calendar can be published as ICS in OWA, then integrated in /e/ Calendar app using ICSx5.
But it’s read-only.

For contacts, unfortunately, I couldn’t find any way to share them :frowning:. Only exporting personal contacts is available.

Thank you @smu44, but as many employees I don’t have the internal power to have my sysadm install IMAP or ICS access, particularly if I’m the only one having this issue in my whole company. I guess the default method is called ActiveSync, but there is not yet such a ‘driver’ in /e/.

Folks,… is there any news on the tracker blocker that was in the pipe for 2020? Desperately waiting for a MS Exchange solution… :eyes:

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Same for me. We need a direct Exchange connection from the OS. Too many corporates use MS Exchange, and many won’t open their server to IMAP or other protocols.

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Same here! We need the possibility for a connection via Exchange/Z-Push too. Hope there are ressources to implement this feature in the future :+1: :grinning:
I like /e/ :wink:

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A question to the /e/ developers. Exchange implementation was part of Android very early, and that implementation is open source (see here: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Exchange/+/master/src/com/android/exchange).
I am just curious why it is not part of /e/. Is it something that has just not been added (yet) or has it been removed on purpose and for a particular reason?