Evolution

Unable to retrieve message Lost connection to Evolution Exchange backend process Absolute fucking bastard. I hate evolution and the way it connects, or rather doesn't connect, to exchange server, with the passion of a thousand, whatever it is's that makes gamma-ray bursts.

Can I Exchange this for something that works?

OK, so they you are running Ubuntu on your work PC. You can connect to the office Exchange server using Evolution so you can get all your email. You are doing all of this using open source software. You are most likely feeling pretty smug.

Eventually you will want to leave the office, so you want to fire on the out of office notifications in Evolution. You read about how to do so. You find out you need to follow this chain of menus and buttons:

Edit -> Preferences -> Edit -> Account Editor -> Exchange Settings -> I am out of the office.

However, at the second "Edit" you get a "Evolution Error" window informing you that the lovely open source program you were oh so smug about "could not read out-of-office state"

Bastard. The problem is that if you google for help on this error, the search terms "state" and "evolution" tend to pollute the results with results about the particular subset of Americans who could politely be called reality-challenged. They could also impolitely be described as the type of fucking cretins who would happily watch their friends and family combusting in agonising pain if their sacred text of choice said that humans were impervious to fire.

Even searching in the Ubuntu Forums, I cannot find an answer to this. Or, come to it, why even though I have selected Global Contact List for Auto Completion in the settings, it doesn't fucking auto complete email addresses from the Global Contacts List.

Using Evolution with Exchange Server

Evolution is to Outlook, as Thunderbird is to Outlook Express. While Thunderbird will let you get your email from your ISP, and from Google (and sometimes, when it fecking works, hotmail), Evolution's big selling point is that it works with Exchange. Exchange being Microsoft's email server.

To get Evolution working in either Ubuntu or Arch you need to install the following packages:

evolution evolution-exchange

When you have installed these, you configure Evolution as follows:
Add an account and specify type as Exchange Server.
You then set these variables:
Receiving E-mail → Username = [domain]/[logon_name]
Receiving E-mail → OWA URL is https://[mail_server_name]/exchange
Receiving Options → Global Catalogue Server Name = [mail_server_ip_address]
Default → Sent Messages Folder = set to Exchange not Local
The system should auto find the exchange account if you click authenticate.
Public Folders are accessed by going Folder → Subscriptions, and choosing Exchange Server.
[domain] examples would be, smoobandit.com, smoobanditprivate.local

Once you pop in your password you should find that Evolution connects and starts downloading all your mail.

However, this is buggier than a trap for Indiana Jones. Every so often, including more than once per day, it will fubar its connection to the exchange server. It either denies there is any mail, or tells you you have 3 messages in the last 3 months. Sometimes this is accompanied by an error saying that it has lost connection to the backend something or other. Sometimes not. The only way to fix this, that I have found, is to open a terminal and run these commands:

evolution --force-shutdown
cd ~/.evolution/mail/exchange
sudo rm -rfv ./[domain]

Then re-run Evolution and it will re-sync to Exchange. This is OK, unless you have something stored locally and not on the server. For instance, if you were drafting an email when the connection fubarred, then you would lose that because it would only be stored locally. Bastard.