Connecting Ubuntu / Mint to exchange mail and calendar

Assumptions and pre-requisites.

This article assumes the Linux user has the following installed:

• An Ubuntu derived distribution such as Ubuntu itself, Linux Mint, and so on
• The email client used is evolution, installed via the following packages and their dependencies:
• evolution
• evolution-common
• evolution-data-server-common
• evolution-mapi
• evolution-ews
• evolution-data-server-goa
• evolution-plugins
• gnome-online-accounts
• gnome-control-center

Setup Details

• Open the system menu and search / type for ‘online accounts‘. Note: you may see multiple entries for this. The correct entry is the one which allows you to select an account of type ‘Microsoft Exchange’ (see below)
• Open online accounts and click on the “+” sign on the lower left to add an account. Make sure to select the type “Microsoft Exchange”

• Type in your email and password
• Expand the “custom” settings and enter:
• Username: your-username@your-domain.com (note the following format has also been reported to work: your-domain\your-username)
• Server: webmail.example.com (note that this is actually the domain of your outlook web access URL. For example, if your webmail URL is webmail.something.com/owa, then this server would be webmail.something.owa)
• Click on connect, and very that the account is being used for mail, calendar and contacts as shown below

• close the online accounts settings box
• Open evolution (close and re-open if evolution was previously open)
• Verify that the account has been successfully added in evolution by:
• Edit > Preferences
• Under Mail Accounts, make sure a corresponding entry to the above is visible in the window. In the below example, you see two such accounts of type ‘EWS” (also distinguishable from their icon looking like a plug, whereas other accounts do not have the icon and have the tickbox)

• Your mail should now be visible under the evolution ‘mail’ tab, and an equivalent calendar should have been automatically added under the ‘calendar’ tab

Additional Notes

If you do not use gnome-online accounts, it is still possible to set this up (though without calendar), the one extra piece of information needed is that along with an account type of ‘EWS’, the host URL should be: https://webmail.example.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx. Also, during troubleshooting, it is useful to see if that URL is reachable.