Recent changes to the email infrastructure around here have meant that those of us on Linux still have some troubles. The Exchange 2007 MAPI connector seems to work pretty well for Mac users, but Evolution’s MAPI provider plugin in Ubuntu 9.10 doesn’t work particularly well at present. It screws up calendars and inserts some strange entities (”=20”) on line breaks in emails, making us seem even geekier than we actually are.
On the upside, Evolution doesn’t freak out very often, as it did with the Exchange 2003 connector. So what happens if we try and compile the MAPI connector from source?
#!/bin/sh #Shut down all running evolution processes evolution --force-shutdown # Make somewhere for the source code to live mkdir ~/evolution cd ~/evolution #Download source code from gnome-evolution project page wget http://download.gnome.org/sources/evolution-mapi/0.28/evolution-mapi-0.28.3.tar.bz2 wget http://download.gnome.org/sources/gtkhtml/3.28/gtkhtml-3.28.3.tar.bz2 #Remove evolution-MAPI package sudo apt-get remove evolution-mapi #Install needed dependencies for compilation sudo apt-get install libdb-dev libnspr4-dev libnss3-dev libical-dev libsqlite3-dev sudo apt-get install bison intltool gnome-core-devel evolution-data-server-dev sudo apt-get install libcanberra-gtk-dev sudo apt-get install libgtkhtml3.8-dev network-manager-dev libunique-dev libhal-dev sudo apt-get install libgtkimageview-dev libpst-dev libnotify-dev sudo apt-get install libmapi-dev samba4-dev libglib2.0-dev sudo apt-get install libebackend1.2-dev libecal1.2-dev libedataserver1.2-dev sudo apt-get install libedata-cal1.2-dev libebook1.2-dev libedata-book1.2-dev sudo apt-get install libcamel1.2-dev evolution-dev libedataserverui1.2-dev # Compile gtkhtml tar fxj gtkhtml-3.28.3.tar.bz2 cd gtkhtml-3.28.3 ./configure && make && sudo make install cd .. # Compile the mapi plugin tar fxj evolution-mapi-0.28.3.tar.bz2 cd evolution-mapi-0.28.3 ./configure && make && sudo make install cd .. # Now you can just start evolution normally and enjoy some improvements!
Calendar invites still screw up and disappear randomly, but at least emails don’t have weird entities strewn all through them, making me feel a little better about things. Hopefully this package will get some love in the forthcoming Ubuntu 10.04! Thanks to the Ubuntu Forums people for providing partial instructions for how to compile these packages (I’ve turned that forum post into a shell script that should hopefully work for most people).
Important Note: this process only works if you’ve already got your Exchange MAPI account set up and properly configured. Installing the evolution-mapi-0.28.3 plugin breaks the UI which is used to enter your account details right at the start of the Evolution setup process, making it impossible to set up any kind of account. This somewhat sucks but I guess if you’ve already got your account set up, it won’t make much difference to you.
The shell script, ready to go, is here. If it eats your dog or provokes an existential crisis, you can back out of the changes it makes like so:
evolution --force-shutdown
cd ~/.evolution
cd evolution-mapi-0.28.3 && sudo make uninstall && cd ..
cd gtkhtml-3.28.3 && sudo make uninstall && cd ..
sudo apt-get install exchange-mapi