I just took a new job, and my new school uses Microsoft Exchange for email, so Thunderbird is out as an option (yes, I’ve tried to read about how to use Thunderbird for Microsoft Exchange—all the instructions are too complicated or incomplete). The computer I got for work was supposedly configured to check Exchange using Outlook, but it didn’t work. I was able to check the web version of Outlook Exchange, but I couldn’t check my email using regular Microsoft Outlook. I kept being prompted for my password, being told Outlook was offline (with no opportunity for me to put it back online), and being unable to launch Outlook and fix it after the errors appeared (I’d just be kicked out of Outlook completely after all the error messages disappeared).
It’s entirely possible that the official tech support might have figured it out for me come Monday, but I spent the weekend trying to figure it out on my own… because I’m just that way. Eventually, through a lot of Google searching of error messages, trial and error, and registry editing; I managed to get Outlook and Microsoft Exchange to play nice with each other. It took me about three hours spread out over two days.
The truly odd thing, though: the Microsoft Exchange email worked perfectly with no fuss when I configured it in Evolution on Ubuntu. No error messages. No extra tweaking. It just worked. How weird is that? (By the way, part of my attempts to get an email client in Windows working with Microsoft Exchange included trying to use a Windows port of Evolution, but that didn’t work out.) I guess I just assumed that since Microsoft created Microsoft Exchange and also Microsoft Outlook that the two would be a cinch to work out with each other. I also thought that maybe Evolution (being a Free application primarily for Linux) would have a hard time working with Microsoft Exchange (a non-Free application designed to work with Windows).