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Our company is moving to Office 365.

We would like to provide access to Office 365 from Linux workstations (Ubuntu 18) so that employees can

  • keep their mails/drafts offline
  • use a better GUI than the web front-end (tree views of mail threads, key bindings, better search etc.)
  • generally can continue to work as usual, staying in their workflow without much disruption
  • client-side filtering/sorting

IMAP and SMTP will most likely not be provided, it'll be EWS only via SSO.

As for MTAs, there is Hiri, but that is not OSS, and it's paid software for larger teams. There is also Mailspring/Nylas, but both seem to be discontinued as of 2017.

As for plugins, there are EWS extensions for Evolution and Exquilla for Thunderbird (paid software).

As the above options don't look quite palatable (apart from Evolution EWS extensions that I haven't tried yet), I'm now thinking of setting up a simple mail fetch on the workstations and have employees' MTA simply point to that so that at least users can retrieve mails in the usual manner.

What is recommended in this scenario? Does fetchmail work in this scenario, and if so, what would its configuration need to look like? What is recommended for a local IMAP server to serve from a maildir/mailbox that fetchmail is generating? Would dovecot be able to serve locally? Or can postfix/sendmail do this?

Thanks for your help.

Sun Wukong
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  • IMAP for fetching mails is not okay, so you want to use ... IMAP for fetching mails? – bjoster May 31 '21 at 15:07
  • I meant to use something (fetchmail? something else?) to get mails from Office 365, in whatever manner is possible, and them serve them locally so that local mail agents can fetch them via IMAP. Perhaps local IMAP is not necessary if I can point the mail agents to an mdir or mbox created by that piece of software that downloads mail from Office 365. – Sun Wukong Jun 01 '21 at 13:22
  • So ... why again don't you just point your local mail agents to the IMAP mailboxes you have paid for in Office 365? – bjoster Jun 01 '21 at 13:28
  • Our company may decide not to turn on IMAP in Office 365. – Sun Wukong Jun 02 '21 at 08:13
  • So you need a IMAP proxy to ... turn off IMAP in Office 365 and still use IMAP? You may turn against this, as this neither ideal nor secure - no proxy service is as secure as no proxy service (and a lot less expensive). I doubt there is any "solution" to this. – bjoster Jun 07 '21 at 20:15

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