Interview with three OpenChange project developers

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.