THIS REPOSITORY IS NOW OBSOLETE

Note: The Akonadi EWS resource has been merged into KDE PIM and will be released with KDE PIM 17.12. The code now lives in the kdepim-runtime repository under resources/ews.

This Akonadi resource provides the ability to use Microsoft Exchange accounts with KDE PIM applications like KMail and KOrganizer.

It allows to use KDE PIM applications with Exchange mailboxes, for which the server administrator has not enabled access using standard e-mail protocols (IMAP, POP3 or SMTP). Additionally since the resource communicates with Exchange using its native protocol (also used by Microsoft Outlook) it allows to use the full capabilities of Exchange which are not accessible over IMAP or POP3.

The aim of this project is to allow full management of Exchange mailboxes so that the KDE PIM suite can become a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Outlook.

Currently the EWS resource is an independent project, but in the long term the plan is for this to become part of KDE PIM.

The EWS resource is currently in preview state. It can be used as a daily driver when it comes to e-mail. For other tasks like calendar interaction (scheduling and accepting meetings) it is necessary to use wither OWA or Microsoft Outlook.

• E-mail reception and full mailbox access
• Message & folder operations (copying, moving, deleting)
• Sending e-mail through Exchange (by default Exchange doesn't use SMTP to send messages from clients)
• Server-side tags
• Calendar view (read-only)

• Full calendar support (currently only read-only support is provided)
• Task support
• Server-side address autocompletion (will need to sort out some KDE PIM limitations)
• Out-of-office status manipulation
• Server-side message filtering
• Access to additional mailboxes & shared calendars

• Microsoft Exchange 2007 SP1 or later
• Qt 5.5 or later
• KDE Frameworks 5.17 or later (at least 5.19 is recommended when using NTLMv2 authentication)*
• KDE PIM 15.04.0 or later

* Alternatively you can also recompile the kio package and backport the following commits from kio.git:

• 5961ac8e Fix NTLMv2 stage 3 response creation
• 2f894291 Try NTLMv2 authentication if the server denies NTLMv1
• f665dd30 Try multiple authentication methods in case of failures

The last commit is only necessary if your system is also configured to use Kerberos.

Akonadi runs every resource in a separate process, which communicates to the Akonadi server over DBus. When multiple instances of the same resource (for ex. multiple Exchange accounts) are present, each of them also runs in a separate process. You can easily find out your EWS resource instances by running ps -fu $(whoami) | grep akonadi_ews_resource.

Each Akonadi resource has a unique identifier. It is composed automatically out of the resource name and a number, which starts from 0 and is incremented with every new resource of that type. Removing a resource and adding it again will not reset the counter. For example the first instance of the EWS resource would use the identidier akonadi_ews_resource_0. The actual resource identifier is visible in the command line of the resource process after executing the ps command above.

By default the resource processes are started by the Akonadi server in the background. All the output is sent to the log (either the journal in case of systemd or the ~/.xsession-errors otherwise).

It is possible to run the resource process in the foreground in which case all the logs will be visible in the active console. Such mode of operation is very useful for debugging.

To run the resource process interactively:

1. Learn the resource identifier (use the ps command above).
2. Kill the resource process. This needs to be done a few times as Akonadi will initially try to restart the resource. The easiest way is to execute while [ $(killall akonadi_ews_resource) ]; do sleep 1; done. Warning, if you have several instances of the Exchange resource (several accounts) this command will terminate all of them.
3. Execute the resource process interactively (substitute the identifier with the one obtained in step 1: akonadi_ews_resource --identifier akonadi_ews_resource_0.

Once running interactively you can at any moment terminate it by pressing Ctrl+C and start it again.

In order to run the resource process in the background again you have to restart Akonadi by executing akonadictl restart.

Currently there are two kinds of debug messages that can be enabled in addition to the default ones:

• Request information (log_ews_resource_request) - prints information about each EWS request sent and the response received.
• Protocol information (log_ews_resource_proto) - dumps all request and response data (XML).

To enable these messages edit (or create) the file ~/.config/QtProject/qtlogging.ini and put the following lines inside:

[Rules]
log_ews_resource_request.debug=true
log_ews_resource_proto.debug=true

Setting each of them to false or adding a # character in front of the line will disable each of the logging categories.

When starting the resource interactively make sure to edit the file and adjust the debug messages before actually starting the resource.

When the protocol information messages are enabled or when some request fails the contents of the request and the associated response will be dumped into files in your /tmp/ directory. The names of the relevant files will be printed in the log next to the information about the failed request. Attaching such dumps can be useful for debugging, however before doing so please make sure they don't contain any confidential information.

Please report bugs on the GitHub project page. In most cases it will be a great help when logs are provided.

Note however that the logs may information from your e-mail that might include company confidential information. Before sending any logs please review them and make sure any such information like e-mail addresses, dates or subjects is anonymized (i.e. replaced by some meaningless information).