Exchange OWA using Python?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2022-04-01, Christian Gollwitzer <auriocus at gmx.de> wrote:
> Am 01.04.22 um 01:26 schrieb Grant Edwards:
>> On 2022-03-31, Christian Gollwitzer <auriocus at gmx.de> wrote:
>>> Davmail is written in Java, not Python, but basically this should
>>> not matter if you only use it.
>> 
>> Have you used it with OWA as the protocol?
>
> At least I thought so - this was in 2016 - 2017 and there was external 
> webmail access allowed to our mail server. I've used davmail to connect 
> to it. I vaguely remember that there was one day a sudden change, 
> webmail was disabled and davmail then connected using EWS. Maybe the OWA 
> protocol also evolved, I now see it on the roadmap.

It was probably at least 5 years ago when EWS got disabled and I
couldn't get davmail to work any longer. It could be that davmail does
support the OWA "API" now. I spent some more time browsing the davmail
web site, and couldn't really find a clear statement one way or the
other.

> Good that you found a solution now with owl!

It's taken some tweaking to get Thunderbird "adjusted". The Exchange
server does some stupid tricks like adding marketing stuff to all
messages before they're sent externally. The logic it uses to decide
_where_ to insert that stuff isn't very good, and Thunderbird's
default reply attribution line causes the marketing "footer" to be
inserted at the top of the message. And if you're not careful about
reply formatting, Outlook will decide to hide the entire message (a
trick it uses to try to compensate for the brain-dead practice of
replying on top and including a copy of all previous e-mails in the
conversation (that way email disk storage is O(N^2) instead of O(N))

I also didn't like the appearance of quoted text in replies from
Thunderbird, so I'm working on an extension to add some CSS to make
quoted text look more like it does with other e-mail clients (with a
"quote bar" on the left). Surprisingly, Thunderbird also lacks any
sort of system-tray support. There's an add-on app that's supposed to
do that, but I haven't tried it yet...

> I'm having a similar issue at my current position, we're using Lotus
> Notes (yes! The package from the 90s, it's outright horrible).

Everybody I've ever known who has used Notes hated it. One wonders why
it continues to be used...

> There is only one thing available, the iNotes exporter, which allows
> to read the mail using thunderbird, sending is not
> implemented. Always keeping fingers crossed that the IT department
> does not update the server protocol. Sometimes they do minor changes
> like internal redirection URL changes, which costs me half a day to
> fix then.

I know how that goes.

--
Grant