I have been searching for a good alternative for MS Office Outlook to act as a desktop Email client for my corporate OWA account. Initially I believed that the outlook express edition will be able to do the trick but it didn’t. Therefore I was wondering what would a Linux user do if he need an email client for OWA. Googling in that perspective revealed that Linux has a beautiful alternative email client called Evolution Email. Therefore I tried Evolution in our Linux machines and found that it is perfectly able to access OWA accounts. Luckily this program also has a windows version which may also works with OWA.
Thus problem solved, I got an email program for OWA. Now whatz up!? Oops, I have been already using thunderbird for my gmail account for a really long time and so I’m not interested in running 2 email client or switching out from my favorite thunderbird. Moreover Thunderbird has an portable edition that need not require installation whereas Evolution doest have one as of now. Also the Evolution window’s version crashes sometimes (In fact most of the times). So finally after trying various plugins and guidelines for OWA in thunderbird from Google, I got it working using an exchange gateway called Davmail.
Ok, here we go. The below steps gives quick info on how to configure thunderbird for OWA using Davmail.
Download the following software and install them.
- Java: (Incase if you don’t already have java in your system)
- Davmail:
- Tunderbird:
Once these are installed open Davmail and change the OWA (Exchange) Url to your corporate exchange URL
- eg: https://mail.mycompany.com/exchange/
Save this and the Davmail will start listening to the request to the ports monitored by it.
Now open Thunder bird and create a new account using the following details as shown in the screenshots below
- First name: This just for your reference
- Email Address: your corporate email address
eg: Firstname.Lastname@mycompany.com
- Password: your email password
- Username: Domain\login ID
- Incoming: localhost Port: 1143
- Outgoing: localhost Port: 1025
Change the username as Domain\login ID in the Outgoing server settings from the manual setup page.
Once all these settings are given check the thunderbird and it will be able to send and receive mails.
For more details check out the video below. If the video is not clear you can download the same from here.
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