Interview with three OpenChange project developers [LWN.net]

May 16, 2007

This article was contributed by Brad Hards

The OpenChange project recently announced the "MAILOOK" release, which provides a library to access Microsoft Exchange servers using native protocols. We recently got a chance to catch up with Julien Kerihuel, Ali Mdidech and Fabien Lementec from the OpenChange project.

LWN: Can you tell us about OpenChange and what the current library is capable of?

Julien Kerihuel: The OpenChange MAPI library (libmapi) provides interoperability with Microsoft Exchange servers, which means being able to communicate with Exchange in the same way that Outlook does. Our primary objective in providing the MAILOOK release is to make our implementation available to beta testers so we can validate the design, evaluate libmapi code scalability and reliability; and thus fix possible inconsistencies before we go to much further in the development process.

This release is a very important step in the project roadmap. It is the first time that we've provided code which can be used in stand-alone applications and which is generic enough to perform most of the messaging operations that final users would deal with, such as:

fetch emails (including those with attachments)
send emails (including those with attachments
delete emails
set multiple recipients to, cc, bcc
UTF8, Unicode and HTML content support
folder creation/deletion

In addition, if developers take a closer look at the repository version (subversion trunk), they will find alpha code for other Exchange items support:

fetch/create calendar events for appointment/meetings screenshot 1, screenshot 2
fetch/create contacts screenshot
fetch/create tasks screenshot
fetch/create sticky notes

These features will be included in the next library release, planned for early June 2007.

The rest of the interview is available here.

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Interview with three OpenChange project developers

Posted May 17, 2007 13:38 UTC (Thu) by AdHoc (subscriber, #1115) [Link]

This is pretty exciting stuff. My company uses exchange/outlook at work. I've gotten evolution to work with it, but it's always been slow and crash prone. I'm not sure if that's due the use of OWA, or something inherent to evolution. Either way, it'd be great to have 'native' support for MAPI _and_ a choice of clients to use.