[mdlug] Accessing the Microsoft Exchange Server via Evolution

[Robert Meier]

Jim, Joseph,

>> I have tried several times in the past few months, especially lately, to set
>> up Evolution to check my exchange e-mail from work. I have tried on XP SP3,
>> Vista Ultimate, and my home PC Xubuntu 8.10.

I've been using evolution for the last year with mail from our company
exchange system.  It has worked >90% of the time, but on several days,
it has been unable to pick up or send any mail.

The failure symptoms have included
  o headers read, but content pane remains blank
  o password dialog remaining open, and a "window not responding"
    dialog appears with the offer to terminate
  o evolution reporting loss of connection with exchange,
    re-established only after quitting evolution, running killev
    and starting evolution again
  o repeating any or all of the above several times
Over the last year, I have begun to associate the failure with
high network load, and the above procedures seems to merely occupy
time, until the net load drops.

Recently, I have noted that access via firefox is often instructive,
sometimes timing out as well, or sometimes supplying an error
message.

Though unproven, I have begun to suspect that when the connection
is lost, the exchange server remembers the client ip and
increases the delays in future connections (for about 24hr).
My coworkers use the word "rolling black hole" to refer
to a similar phenomenon.

My workaround is to wait until after business hours (or the
network load otherwise drops) before trying to restore a connection.

Hopefully helpful,
-- 
Bob

  "The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men,
   but that men will begin to think like computers."
     -- Sydney J. Harris