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Exchange support is probably ridiculously hard because I can’t imagine there’s all that many open source implementations for it.

Matrix support is probably a ton easier.

Besides, matrix is designed to be implemented by multiple parties. Exchange isn’t. In fact, exchange is almost certainly the opposite.



The exchange protocol is like CORBA and the US tax system got together and had a baby. You’d also need an exchange server to test it with, and running an exchange server isn’t trivial.


You can simply implement ActiveSync though and test against a free Microsoft account, which also uses Exchange for mail.


In addition to Evolution mentioned in another reply, KDE's KMail supports exchange (through Akonadi), and it seems to work quite well for me.


> Exchange support is probably ridiculously hard because I can’t imagine there’s all that many open source implementations for it.

There are at least two, based on EWS (Exchange Web Services):

- evolution-ews (Gnome)

- akonadi-ews (KDE)


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Evolution

Believe there are libraries available as well.


The exchange support for Evolution never worked well for me. There was always something that didn't sync, didn't get detected, or wasn't supported.

I don't blame the devs, Exchange is a proprietary standard so you can't expect it to work well. It's like the reverse-engineered drivers for hardware the manufacturer doesn't bother to write Linux support or sufficient documentation for: it doesn't work great, but that's despite the devs' best effort, not because of it.


> The exchange support for Evolution never worked well for me.

it has been working beautifully for me in the past 6-7 years

including calendar and contacts

> the manufacturer doesn't bother to write Linux support or sufficient documentation for

you mean documentation, like this?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/client-developer/w...

Microsoft has many flaws, but not writing documentation it's not usually one of them.




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