MS Outlook circumvention in favor of Gnus?

MS Outlook circumvention in favor of Gnus?

[Johnny]

Dear list members,

In short, how does one avoid using Outlook, despite being forced to
send and receive mails through it?

A bit longer:

So comes the dilemma working for a monolithic non-IT company stuck on MS
products forcing all employees into the Outlook email client! I spent
the entire day trying to make it behave reasonably, but even simple
threading is impossible to accomplish as all emails with the same
subject line is considered a thread! Not to mention splitting, scoring
and linking from org-mode... or any other useful customisation. In
return, I get all those little boxes to click on in obscure
menus, /very/ helpful...

While it is out of the question to get a custom email client installed,
I am wondering if there anyone on the list know good workarounds to
ideally get mail dynamically into Gnus?

I am thinking something like making Outlook automatically dump all mails
in a local mailbox on receipt and then read it locally by
Gnus. Unfortunately it seems .pst files are the only options and it
doesn't seem this can be directly accessed by Gnus... 

I am stuck with Windows XP and Outlook 2003, but believe installing
emacs 23.3 with Gnus 5.13 should be possible.

Any ideas and workarounds greatly appreciated!


-- 
Johnny

Re: MS Outlook circumvention in favor of Gnus?

[Adam Sjøgren]

On Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:50:12 +0100, Johnny wrote:

> While it is out of the question to get a custom email client installed,
> I am wondering if there anyone on the list know good workarounds to
> ideally get mail dynamically into Gnus?

My favourite workaround is to beg for the Microsoft Exchange Server to
have/get IMAP enabled (this is what I use).

Second thing to try is to run Evolution¹, and have that run all new
emails through deliver or similar, and have Gnus slurp them from
/var/mail/.

Thirdly there is a project to write a MAPI-library, they might have some
stuff to fetch emails with - the project is called OpenChange¹.


  Best of luck,

    Adam

¹ http://projects.gnome.org/evolution/ - what versions of Exchange it
  can talk to currently I'm not sure.
² http://www.openchange.org/

-- 
 "[...] but beyond that the Fry household had as much         Adam Sjøgren
  interest or understanding of sport as a potato has of  asjo@koldfront.dk
  Riemann's zeta function."

Re: MS Outlook circumvention in favor of Gnus?

[Johnny]

asjo@koldfront.dk (Adam Sjøgren) writes:

> On Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:50:12 +0100, Johnny wrote:
>
>> While it is out of the question to get a custom email client installed,
>> I am wondering if there anyone on the list know good workarounds to
>> ideally get mail dynamically into Gnus?
>
> My favourite workaround is to beg for the Microsoft Exchange Server to
> have/get IMAP enabled (this is what I use).

Hopefully IMAP is already enabled and it is possible to find the
necessary account settings through Outlook (e.g. imap server and port in
authinfo). [1]

Is the username and password normally the same as machine login
credentials (in typical office-based solutions) as there are no separate
(user managed) credentials for the mail server?

Maybe this could be easy after all?


Footnotes: 
[1]  It looks like one should be able to go to the settings for the
account under Tools in Outlook and find all settings. 

-- 
Johnny

Re: MS Outlook circumvention in favor of Gnus?

[Adam Sjøgren]

On Fri, 07 Oct 2011 22:50:38 +0100, Johnny wrote:

> asjo@koldfront.dk (Adam Sjøgren) writes:

> Hopefully IMAP is already enabled and it is possible to find the
> necessary account settings through Outlook (e.g. imap server and port in
> authinfo). [1]

I guess it is - it's been a while since I had to set it up (actually, I
think it also was a version of Outlook ago), so I can't help with where.

I do know that I have to use SSL (i.e. imaps).

> Is the username and password normally the same as machine login
> credentials (in typical office-based solutions) as there are no separate
> (user managed) credentials for the mail server?

I guess it depends on how they set it up, but the login/password for the
Exchange server at my workplace is identical to my usual login/password.


  Best of luck,

    Adam

-- 
 "Gav                                                         Adam Sjøgren
  Strik"                                                 asjo@koldfront.dk

Re: MS Outlook circumvention in favor of Gnus?

[Sivaram Neelakantan]

On Fri, Oct 07 2011,Johnny  wrote:

> Dear list members,
>
> In short, how does one avoid using Outlook, despite being forced to
> send and receive mails through it?
>

[snipped 23 lines]

> Any ideas and workarounds greatly appreciated!

IMAP.  And that too, to read and send emails. Faced with a similar
situation many years ago, I used gnus to read and send emails and
nothing more complicated.  Not scoring, setting custom marks etc.,
that used to make MS Exchange bork.

You need to check whether IMAP is enabled at all first; in all
likelihood if there is web access to your email, then it may be
enabled. 

You could also try the fetchmail-->local spool-->gnus route using
cygwin(another software install) which worked for me.  msmtp on cygwin
might also work to send emails.  All this requires a bit of
experimentation and don't be surprised to get some flak from your
Email admin chaps.  They already have enough problems without some
random chap coming in and saying 'oi, can you enable this/that for
me?"

Your virus scanner/firewall rules would interfere sometimes and some
places don't allow you to touch the virus software, so be aware of
that.  Don't touch it without permission because you'd be in serious
trouble for violating company security policy. 

Do it one step at a time especially installing software that is not
'authorised'.

 sivaram
 -- 

Re: MS Outlook circumvention in favor of Gnus?

[Johnny]

Thanks for all ideas, it will be worth some serious experimentation next
week! 

Sivaram Neelakantan <nsivaram.net@gmail.com> writes:

> You could also try the fetchmail-->local spool-->gnus route using
> cygwin(another software install) 

I have to rely on a solution that involves minimal customisation and
involvement from the IT department, so cygwin may be too optimistic.

> don't be surprised to get some flak from your Email admin chaps. They
> already have enough problems without some random chap coming in and
> saying 'oi, can you enable this/that for me?"

I never understood this attitude from some IT admins. Surely, IT is as
/support/ function in the company to /empower/ the employees to do their
work ? But no, if you need any productivity tools outside of the default
toolbox (aka MS Office), you're out of luck! It is like Lance Armstrong[1]
signing up for Tour de France and being told "here, you must use this
penny-farthing[2]", or hiring a carpenter to build your house and when
he shows up with his DeWalt toolkit saying "no, you have to use these
Aldi tools I keep at /my/ home". Why hire a professional and then
deliberatly cripple him/her?

Sorry about the rant, but I find this really frustrating!

Footnotes: 
[1]  No, I am not drawing any parallells to myself here!
[2]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny-farthing

-- 
Johnny

Re: MS Outlook circumvention in favor of Gnus?

[Vijay Lakshminarayanan]

Johnny <yggdrasil@gmx.co.uk> writes:

> Sivaram Neelakantan <nsivaram.net@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> You could also try the fetchmail-->local spool-->gnus route using
>> cygwin(another software install) 
>
> I have to rely on a solution that involves minimal customisation and
> involvement from the IT department, so cygwin may be too optimistic.

FWIW, cygwin installation does not require admin privileges so you
could, potentially, install it without any issues...

-- 
Cheers
~vijay

Gnus should be more complicated.

Re: MS Outlook circumvention in favor of Gnus?

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Johnny <yggdrasil@gmx.co.uk>:

> In short, how does one avoid using Outlook, despite being forced to
> send and receive mails through it?

As others have said: if IMAP is enabled on the Exchange server, it
should work fine with gnus.

If you can't get IMAP enabled on Exchange, there's DavMail:
 http://davmail.sourceforge.net/

This is a gateway that talks Exchange WebMail with exchange, and exposes
IMAP, POP3, SMTP and Caldav on the other side, for gnus and other
programs to talk to.

It's written in Java, so you should be able to run it locally on your
windows box.