Peter's Blog

Did you get LDAP searches working in thunderbird?

Dude,

I have the same problem as all the others that visited your site, viz. configuring Thunderbird to work on MS Exchange Server. I'm sure you know how to get that done but your blog is absolutely uninformative from a step-by-step do-it-yourself perspective. You "enabled an IMAP service on the server"??!!! Huh?! You could have been a lot more elaborate.

Sending you my email id. Plz send me a step-by-step dummies guide to setting up Thunderbird for Exchange Server. And especially mention the data fields like port no, server id, etc that I need to ask my system admin guy for. (Yeah, he doesn't know how to get it done either).

Thanks,

Deepak Patnaik

Um, do I have time to write a dummies guide? I skimmed over this because anyone who has administered exchange server should be able to do it easily. The ports are all left at the defaults.

On thunderbird you just run through the standard add-new-account wizard, remembering to choose IMAP.

Peter

No I never did. I went off using thunderbird one day when I was using a packet sniffer to debug something and saw my account password go by. I could hide it with SSL but that involved hastle with certificates and certificate servers so I went back to using Outlook and using Windows authentication to log in.

Peter

Hmm.. the biggest problem is when you want to set-up Thundy and not exChange! I want to access my professional email and there is only one setup of exChange which will not change. I think people look for a backport of Thundy handly exChange request, as Evolution do. So far, I have not seen anything from the side of Thunderbird about this compatibility... If one of you noticed sth, lemme know! Cheers! PY

Are you serious? Are you paying him? Since when does he owe you a step by step dummies guide? It's one thing to ask for more details; it's quite another to demand he email you a detailed guide. MS charges like 250 bucks an hour for that kind of crap. Call them.

Thanks for what light you did shine on the subject, peter.

Is there any reason why you might not want to enable the IMAP service, like security or performance?

IMAP works fine except that with basic security ones unencoded password gets broadcast over the network where a packet sniffer will see it with crystal clarity and effortless simplicity.

A better form of security is to use SSL but that requires an SSL certificate and an appropriate server. Windows 2000 can do this but I can't be bothered to work out how.

Peter

Man, that was dirt easy. Thx!

The problem comes when you don't have access to the Exchange cluster. Unfortunately in my (current) job, we don't have a choice but to use Exchange / MAPI. I know several folks that manage the Exchange farm but they won't turn on IMAP.

In my case, I'm have no choice but to rdesktop into a Windows box and use Outlook.

Until there is a MAPI connector reverse engineered for Thunderbird, the 'Outlook' is bleak..

esd

I think the Outlook is bleak for Thunderbird anyway now that mozilla are dropping it. It could do with a bit more fire in it's belly. Reverse engineering any Microsoft stuff is no easy job though (Samba is a miracle).

Peter

I have been hunting down information on Thunderbird and connecting to an exchange server. I compiled this wiki page from the information I have gathered. Please help me expand it.

http://help.ubuntu.com/community/ThunderbirdExchange

I want to use thunderbird but our mail server is microsft exchange it doesnt allow pop or imap. What is the solution??

Get your Exchange guys to enable the protocols

as an exchange administrator i would never enable pop or imap. those protocols are dangerous as passwords are not secured. since exchange tied into active directory, when someone’s password and user ID become compromised so does their network access credentials. There is a reason Microsoft disabled those protocols by default. very very dangerous. either use outlook or outlook web access.

As an exchange administrator you also ought to be aware that you can secure pop and imap using ssl.

To quote the online help for exchange 2003:

Exchange Server 2003Authentication Use this dialog box to define how users gain access to the virtual server. You can require each user to supply a password before connecting. You can also choose to support encryption when users log on.

Important Use Simple Authentication and Security Layer or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) to ensure that user authentication information is not passed over the network in clear text. If your server is accessible from the Internet, you should configure SSL to further inhibit the interception of critical information. SSL encrypts all data (including e-mail content) passed over the network, while Simple Authentication and Security Layer provides methods for identifying and authenticating users and optionally negotiating a secure communications layer for information exchanged between the client and server.

Peter

I work for a company that provides full Exchange connectivity using MAPI (using Java).

What I'm interested in is the complexity of adding a new protocol type to TB, while allowing TB to handle the work of displaying message lists, etc. Can I create an XPCOM implementation that magically gets used? Or do I need special XUL overlays/javascript hacks, etc for everything? I want TB to ask my protocol automatically for folders, messages, etc.

I've written extensions in FF that use Java, so I'm no stranger to doing such work - it just seems there's no info about what I'm trying to do.

Thanks!

Dude,

I have been working for another company as a hired employee. My company has provided me one laptop but i am unable to login to their network. I have to check my mails using webmail. Can anyone give me suggestion how can i use outlook or thunderbird to retrieve my mails from server?

efat

Where is your mail server? If it is outside this companies firewall then it all depends on what ports they have open in the firewall. I can't help you much without knowing more about the setup.

Personally I'm quite happy using google mail, as a web application it isn't so bad.

Peter

HI. I'm struggling with this issue: I configured all settings in Thunderbird to work with our Exchange server at work, but I can't get authenticated into our mail server. I get to the login and I get: "login to server xxxx.institution.edu failed".

I spoke with our mail admin., and IMAP and SMTP is enabled, he said it happens when Thunderbird tries to log directly into xxxx.institution.edu with account myaccount@xxxx.institution.edu and not myaccount@institution.edu

He said, he configured it once successfully, but couldn't remember how to do it.

He said there is no myaccount@xxxx.institution.edu address. Is there way I can force Thunderbird to resolve to my e-mail address? I'm sure I'm on the right track, but it's this little setting that keeps everything from not working. I looked into the JScript file under the application data folder for thunderbird. I see the resolving names, but can't figure which one controls to path of authentication. Help!

I can't help much as I don't understand where the xxxx. part is coming from. Is it something you have typed into the settings somewhere?

If you didn't type it in then I wouldn't be surprised if it was a dns problem.

Peter

I need to know if someone could connect thunderbird with exchange using the new MS protocol "rpc over http" (it suppose to be more secure, than IMAPS ), the configuration is very tricky and i could not use IMAP or POP3 by the company policies.

In outlook you must configue and http proxy, in connection tab.

please help me, i hate Outlook and his pst files!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Interesting thread...thanks

I am currently using Tbird 2.0.0.14 (windows and linux) with exchange 2007 IMAP, using TLS connection , no secure authentication.

Works, just sharing some known issues.

- seems slower than cyrus, my inbox has ~ 7K mails. yes I use it as a file system.

- I no longer had hundreds of inbox-nstmp files..

- exchange admins don't like inbox > 300mb, not cost of storage issue..

- failed to copy sent mail to folder, retry ?? seems to fail now and again, retry always works.. dunno fix.

- Exchange sometimes sends me an error in email... this seems to be a known MS-Exchange bug, fix being worked...

--------------- Exchange 2007 IMAP4 server failed to retrieve the following message:

The message could not be retrieved using the IMAP4 protocol. The message has not been deleted and may be accessible using either Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access. You can also try contacting the original sender of the message to find out about the contents of the message.

Retrieval of this message will be retried when the server is updated with a fix that addresses the problem. ---------------

Efat: You may want to look into using Evolution with the Exchange connector. I believe it connects to OWA (exchange webmail) and this might help you out.

brontos

Hey Peter, thanks for the info. Reading just the first 5 lines in this blog helped me in configuring my Thunderbird with MicrosoftExchangeServer.