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I pay for the Owl extension [0] which allows me to use my university's MS Exchange account with Thunderbird. I don't understand why Mozilla don't offer this the

I pay for the Owl extension [0] which allows me to use my university's MS Exchange account with Thunderbird. I don't understand why Mozilla don't offer this themselves though, is it too complicated to put the effort in given the size of the userbase? Or is there some reason it has to be proprietary and they're against releasing proprietary software? I really appreciate Owl, but I'd much rather just pay Mozilla directly for it. 0: https://www.beonex.com/owl/ https://www.beonex.com/owl/

fikama 5y ago
I think thunderbird is now an independent project, it doesn't belong to Mozilla
- opheliate 5y ago
  I thought that too, I was a bit confused by the fact Mozilla are still operating the donations in the OP, which is why I mention Mozilla specifically. Definitely s/Mozilla/Thunderbird devs/ if that's wrong though.
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  From the donation page: > Contributions go to MZLA Technologies Corporation, a California corporation wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation. Funds will be reserved for use in the Thunderbird project. Contributions are not tax-deductible as charitable contributions.
ruiidont 5y ago
Did you check if there's a bug report for this (marked as enhancements)? Google bugzilla
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
pm215 5y ago
I get the impression that this kind of thing depends rather on what specific locked-down settings choices the Exchange admins have made. I use work's Office-365 mail setup (which is I assume basically "exchange in the cloud") with stock thunderbird plus the free "TbSync" and "Provider for Exchange ActiveSync" addons, for instance (and I only need those for calendar and contacts stuff). This relies on the Exchange server not having disabled IMAP and SMTP. So the userbase for this kind of connector feature is not just "people whose organisation uses Exchange" but "people whose organisation uses Exchange and whose mail admins are sufficiently anti non-Outlook clients to have turned off IMAP but not so anti non-Outlook clients as to just say that it's policy that you must use Outlook". (There was a period where stock Thunderbird couldn't handle a "Modern Authentication" Exchange setup, but as of Thunderbird 78 or so it now can.) More generally, I've found in the past that "open source connectors etc to Exchange" support tends to be or become abandonware, because generally the kind of person who writes that sort of addon/integration doesn't really like working in the sort of environment which mandates Exchange and locks it down, and so after a few years when they move on to a new job that doesn't require them to use Exchange the addon becomes abandonware because the original author no longer needs it. So it probably does need to be either Mozilla taking it on as a "we must support this" feature or somebody like Beonex making it a paid product.
aidenn0 5y ago
I find davmail to be the best way to access exchange. It connects to exchange and sets up local proxies using pop, IMAP, SMTP, and calDav. Then I can use whichever client I like. Otherwise it's just bouncing between which client has had the exchange plugins updated most recently. As a bonus, it's distributed as a jar, so you can download and run for the latest support, even on an LTS of a Linux distro
- abdullahkhalids 5y ago
  How heavy is davmail on the system? I am always a little paranoid about java apps. Can you accept/reject meeting invites with it? The Tbsync extension that I am using does not have this feature.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    accept/reject meeting invites seems to depend on your CalDAV client. It doesn't work well with TB, but works great with Evolution. I haven't dug into what's actually happening because when it didn't work with TB, it was spamming peoples inboxes (e.g. one time it decided to reject every single instance of a recurring meeting that had been going on for years), so I just set the calendar to read-only in TB.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    It uses about half a GB of ram when actively running on my system. CPU usage is fine except when I sync an IMAP folder that has over 10k or so messages, at which point it does pin one CPU. [edit] I noticed I'm running it with "java -Xmx512M" which probably explains the half-GB of ram usage. It's possible that if I increased that value it would perform better with large folders, but I keep my inbox fairly reasonable and I don't care if the other folders take a bit of time to sync.
    - abdullahkhalids 5y ago
      Thanks. I am not going to use 500 MB of my RAM for this one thing.
abdullahkhalids 5y ago
Does Owl allow you to proprly respond (accept/reject) to meeting invites? I am using TBSync and Provider for Exchange ActiveSync and that cannot do so.
jcranmer 5y ago
> I don't understand why Mozilla don't offer this themselves though, is it too complicated to put the effort in given the size of the userbase? That's the short answer to the question. A longer answer: the underlying Exchange protocol is another IMAP-level of complexity of protocol, and the IMAP protocol implementation in Thunderbird is itself running somewhere in the 50KLOC region. On top of that, the protocol itself (I believe) largely works in Outlook's not-a-regular-RFC 822-email-message representation, which means you need to build in a translation layer to make it work well. Finally, a lot of the logic in Thunderbird isn't really designed for pluggable account types, and that it's even possible to a degree is up to work that rkent and I did to make it barely possible for extensions to do so; incorporating the code in core would require properly fixing several of the places rather than continuing the various levels of hacks in place. Now what's the benefit of adding it core? If you're using TB for your small/medium enterprise, then the better answer is to just switch on IMAP access on the server, which is much better supported in TB (and other clients). So the value-add is comparatively minimal, especially compared to doing something like supporting JMAP (which is somewhat closer to a sane modernization of IMAP than EWS is). It's going to rank lower priority than other fixes, then, especially given the technical debt TB suffers from.
- opheliate 5y ago
  Thanks so much for your response, as well as your work on Thunderbird/MailNews! I’m pretty sure I must be using your code every day, it’s really appreciated. That all makes sense, I think the reason my uni refuse to allow normal IMAP is because they’re trying to enforce 2FA-only access to their systems, which could become more common down the line.

fikama 5y ago

I think thunderbird is now an independent project, it doesn't belong to Mozilla

opheliate 5y ago
I thought that too, I was a bit confused by the fact Mozilla are still operating the donations in the OP, which is why I mention Mozilla specifically. Definitely s/Mozilla/Thunderbird devs/ if that's wrong though.
wodenokoto 5y ago
From the donation page: > Contributions go to MZLA Technologies Corporation, a California corporation wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation. Funds will be reserved for use in the Thunderbird project. Contributions are not tax-deductible as charitable contributions.

ruiidont 5y ago

Did you check if there's a bug report for this (marked as enhancements)? Google bugzilla

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

pm215 5y ago

I get the impression that this kind of thing depends rather on what specific locked-down settings choices the Exchange admins have made. I use work's Office-365 mail setup (which is I assume basically "exchange in the cloud") with stock thunderbird plus the free "TbSync" and "Provider for Exchange ActiveSync" addons, for instance (and I only need those for calendar and contacts stuff). This relies on the Exchange server not having disabled IMAP and SMTP. So the userbase for this kind of connector feature is not just "people whose organisation uses Exchange" but "people whose organisation uses Exchange and whose mail admins are sufficiently anti non-Outlook clients to have turned off IMAP but not so anti non-Outlook clients as to just say that it's policy that you must use Outlook". (There was a period where stock Thunderbird couldn't handle a "Modern Authentication" Exchange setup, but as of Thunderbird 78 or so it now can.) More generally, I've found in the past that "open source connectors etc to Exchange" support tends to be or become abandonware, because generally the kind of person who writes that sort of addon/integration doesn't really like working in the sort of environment which mandates Exchange and locks it down, and so after a few years when they move on to a new job that doesn't require them to use Exchange the addon becomes abandonware because the original author no longer needs it. So it probably does need to be either Mozilla taking it on as a "we must support this" feature or somebody like Beonex making it a paid product.

aidenn0 5y ago

I find davmail to be the best way to access exchange. It connects to exchange and sets up local proxies using pop, IMAP, SMTP, and calDav. Then I can use whichever client I like. Otherwise it's just bouncing between which client has had the exchange plugins updated most recently. As a bonus, it's distributed as a jar, so you can download and run for the latest support, even on an LTS of a Linux distro

abdullahkhalids 5y ago
How heavy is davmail on the system? I am always a little paranoid about java apps. Can you accept/reject meeting invites with it? The Tbsync extension that I am using does not have this feature.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  accept/reject meeting invites seems to depend on your CalDAV client. It doesn't work well with TB, but works great with Evolution. I haven't dug into what's actually happening because when it didn't work with TB, it was spamming peoples inboxes (e.g. one time it decided to reject every single instance of a recurring meeting that had been going on for years), so I just set the calendar to read-only in TB.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  It uses about half a GB of ram when actively running on my system. CPU usage is fine except when I sync an IMAP folder that has over 10k or so messages, at which point it does pin one CPU. [edit] I noticed I'm running it with "java -Xmx512M" which probably explains the half-GB of ram usage. It's possible that if I increased that value it would perform better with large folders, but I keep my inbox fairly reasonable and I don't care if the other folders take a bit of time to sync.
  - abdullahkhalids 5y ago
    Thanks. I am not going to use 500 MB of my RAM for this one thing.

abdullahkhalids 5y ago

Does Owl allow you to proprly respond (accept/reject) to meeting invites? I am using TBSync and Provider for Exchange ActiveSync and that cannot do so.

jcranmer 5y ago

> I don't understand why Mozilla don't offer this themselves though, is it too complicated to put the effort in given the size of the userbase? That's the short answer to the question. A longer answer: the underlying Exchange protocol is another IMAP-level of complexity of protocol, and the IMAP protocol implementation in Thunderbird is itself running somewhere in the 50KLOC region. On top of that, the protocol itself (I believe) largely works in Outlook's not-a-regular-RFC 822-email-message representation, which means you need to build in a translation layer to make it work well. Finally, a lot of the logic in Thunderbird isn't really designed for pluggable account types, and that it's even possible to a degree is up to work that rkent and I did to make it barely possible for extensions to do so; incorporating the code in core would require properly fixing several of the places rather than continuing the various levels of hacks in place. Now what's the benefit of adding it core? If you're using TB for your small/medium enterprise, then the better answer is to just switch on IMAP access on the server, which is much better supported in TB (and other clients). So the value-add is comparatively minimal, especially compared to doing something like supporting JMAP (which is somewhat closer to a sane modernization of IMAP than EWS is). It's going to rank lower priority than other fixes, then, especially given the technical debt TB suffers from.

opheliate 5y ago
Thanks so much for your response, as well as your work on Thunderbird/MailNews! I’m pretty sure I must be using your code every day, it’s really appreciated. That all makes sense, I think the reason my uni refuse to allow normal IMAP is because they’re trying to enforce 2FA-only access to their systems, which could become more common down the line.