this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
179 points (97.4% liked)
Open Source
31713 readers
100 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Here is my understanding of it -
Currently, TB uses POP3/IMAP protocol to access your Mailbox on Exchange Server.
Ideally, it should be done via MS EWS Web API [1][2] which TB currently doesn't support, but MS Office Outlook does.
Given that MS Exchange is heavily used in corporate/company setup, it[3] will put TB on par with Outlook in that regard.
[1] https://www.techtarget.com/searchwindowsserver/definition/Exchange-Web-Services-EWS
[2] https://www.envisionup.com/blog/pop3-imap-microsoft-exchange-email-platform-use/
[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1847846
Just to add, consumer outlook / live / hotmail also benefits from this since it is also using Exchange in backend.
Additionally EWS is atually deprecated and planned to be closed on 2026 October for at least commercial Exchange Online (M365 / Cloud) customers (unclear from that article if free Outlook accounts also will be affected) although as with all MS announcements it will probably be prolonged. Microsoft Graph API is the new hot thing, but it seems some EWS features are not yet available in Graph API based on comments.
Another thing that in a proper company setting that uses Exchange Online you must approve applications before they can be used to access data (Not just Exchange data, this is Entra ID formerly Azure AD feature) for both EWS (in the past it was different, but now Oauth must be used which requires approval) and Graph API so company administrator will have to approve Thunderbird which many will not allow.