This page retained for history only, about the initial transition to Office365.
You want davmail if you use IMAP (e.g. Thunderbird) to access your email. You do not need to know about it if you use Outlook or AppleMail, or the web interface, or most mobile phone apps.
Native Office365 settings
Emails on Office365 can be accessed via its web interface, at either:
sydney.edu.au/office365
sydney.edu.au/email
http://outlook.com/owa/unisyd.onmicrosoft.com
or even
outlook.office365.com
or by using Outlook or MacMail or many mobile phone apps (as
Exchange mail).
For other email clients, Office365 supports IMAP/POP and SMTP, as per
POP and IMAP settings for Office 365
or
Uni sharepoint O365 FAQ
so using settings:
| proto | host | port | security | ||||
| IMAP | outlook.office365.com | 993 | SSL/TLS | ||||
| POP | outlook.office365.com | 995 | SSL/TLS | ||||
| SMTP | smtp.office365.com | 587 | STARTTLS |
| Username | your @sydney email address | ||
| Password | your unikey password |
(or you could set forwarding).
Access to the
Online Archive
is possible with the web interface or Outlook, but not most other
clients and not via IMAP, as per
Microsoft documentation.
The IMAP/SMTP response of Office365 is woefully slow.
Maybe this is as mentioned in
Microsoft documentation:
Note
Each time a person accesses a POP-based or IMAP-based email program
to open his or her Microsoft 365 or Office 365 email, that user will
experience a delay of several seconds. The delay results from using a
proxy server ...
... or may be just a sneaky way for Microsoft to promote Outlook and
discourage other email clients.
Our davmail server has host name
Our davmail server could also support/accept:
Our davmail server uses
http://davmail.sourceforge.net/
software. The server accepts POP/IMAP/SMTP connections, and "translates"
the requests into EWS (Exchange Web Services) access: provides standard
interfaces, using only supported EWS access to Office365 mail. Our
server talks to the Office365 Exchange server at
outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx, as set within its
configuration; that choice is not part of the "conversation" with the
client; it cannot be used to access any other Exchange servers: to
access another, a different davmail service would need to be set up.
It could be used "as is" for any other Office365 clients or login
schemes, e.g. it should work for
"student" email
@uni.sydney.edu.au accounts.
Our davmail server runs on a "virtual machine" using just some idle CPU
cycles, for zero cost. This service might be used by the whole Uni
community (or even worldwide?), not just Maths. It would not be able to
handle the network bandwidth if it became popular. Laptop users might
instead run davmail themselves, locally.
Davmail SMTP effectively sends via EWS, and that does not keep an
original "Date:" header, but replaces it with UTC timezone and at the
time the message is handled by Office365. Some other SMTP headers are
also added or deleted. Send yourself a message, then look at the headers
in the Office365 Sent and Inbox folders, and weep.
The Office365
Online Archive
can be accessed via davmail, at least
with Thunderbird.
Curiously and amazingly, davmail is faster than Office365 IMAP or
SMTP, e.g. "send" is in the blink of an eye, no 10-second wait.
In your Thunderbird go to
To avoid duplicates in "Sent", still in
Click OK.
To access the
Online Archive
follow the
instructions
(or my
rip-off):
Go to Check your setup.
In your Apple Mail go to
On the gmail web interface, go to
This setting "gives away" your unikey password to your email service.
Not an issue if you trust them. (Probably your laptop and phone also
"remember" this password, anyway.)
Two or three Gmail oddities to BEWARE of.
Go to Check your setup.
Go to Check your setup.
Seems that in your ~/.pinerc file, you need to add lines like
One problem may(?) remain: a message sent by alpine then shown by it,
may say:
Go to Check your setup.
Other mail services may have "add account" features (similar to
gmail). Succeeded on mail.com (its "mail collector" using IMAP to
webmail.sydney on port 993, it could also send email as if it was
from @sydney, no davmail at all).
Any other clients or any problems, please ask
Paul.
Some of the blurb below is non-original, been (wrongly!) updated since the change to OAuth2.
Do not store old, long-term, or important messages on Office365, but
keep in "local" folders.
BEWARE of unikey password changes. Currently there is an
enforced yearly change, and if you change then you may need to re-do the
settings in your mail client (gmail or thunderbird or phone etc). (Or if
you forget, then you may end up with your account locked after too many
bad tries.) Best to leave your unikey password as it was: go through 5
or 10 changes, then back.
Note how
"student" email
on @uni.sydney.edu.au is outsourced to the same Office365 cloud,
though with a different login scheme.
Note that with IMAP you can copy messages (in either direction)
between Office365 and other folders: try to take advantage of the
unlimited storage offered by Office365.
The Uni wants to store data only on servers under trusted
jurisdictions, and gmail/google has servers in some Asian countries. The
Uni trusts Microsoft (both @sydney and @uni.sydney are really Office365),
Mimecast (our spam filter), trusted Symantec (previous spam filter), and
say Cloudstor and Dropbox; so far the Uni does not seem to worry about
Google Drive. There is a push to have mobile devices (their data, and
the passwords they remember)
encrypted
but that does not seem monitored or enforced.
BEWARE of the Uni
Mimecast
spam filter, noting that all @maths and @sydney messages received, and
any sent by Office365, go through it.
Apologies for the verbiage.
Paul Szabo
psz@maths.usyd.edu.au
17 Nov 23
Our davmail server
and it supports/accepts:
with SSL/TLS encryption and "normal password" authentication, with the
@sydney email address as username (not unikey), and unikey
password. Davmail can be used for any "IMAP" services e.g. Thunderbird
or Apple Mail, or for the gmail web interface, from anywhere.
both with SSL/TLS encryption, but it does not: LDAP not because it would
be blocked by the ICT border router on some bogus security grounds, and
CalDAV not because it does not seem needed or wanted.
Setup instructions
Thunderbird
and there set:
then Re-Test, Done. (When asked for a password, use the matching
unikey password.)
(since Office365 or davmail does pretty much the same anyway).
Click OK, then re-start Thunderbird.
and maybe un-check (not select) the setting:
Apple Mail
You do not need (cannot use?) IMAP or davmail... so just for the record.
Set things up as an Exchange account:
and there set:
Continue, let it check, then Create. Go to Check your
setup.
Gmail web interface
You may (instead?) set redirect forwarding from Office365 to gmail, see
set forwarding
as mentioned above.
and add your "central" mail account via our davmail server:
Say "yes" to send mail as this new account, or in
un-select "treat as alias", then set:
then wait for the verification code to arrive in your email, add it.
Maybe also choose "Reply from the same address the message was sent to".
To Check your setup below, on Office365 send
a message to some new or non-existent user, copy that Sent or Draft
into your Inbox.
This makes it hard to set gmail to "send as" for most users, even
when using their "true" addresses. In the past, gmail would just send
a confirmation email, and if you replied then set that as "sender"
address. Seems gmail noticed this was unsafe, e.g. as it allowed
anyone to send as a mailing list they were subscribed to.
Mutt
Seems that in your ~/.mutt/muttrc file, you need to add lines like
(example for Paul Szabo, address paul.szabo@sydney.edu.au):
Alpine
(example for Paul Szabo, address paul.szabo@sydney.edu.au):
In the alpine SETUP Config menu, you need to enable
Expose Hidden Config (then exit and re-enter config) to set
Disable These Authenticators.
I do not know what causes this.
Other mail clients
Seems the gmail app on phones can use your Exchange account to be
added, more directly (or it could use IMAP). That alone would be
enough if you only ever used that gmail app; not sure whether
necessary (or would cause duplicates) once you have set gmail via
the web interface; I did not yet test the phone app.
Check your setup
After setting up your email client, check that email reception works:
log in to
Office365,
copy some message into your Inbox, see it appear in your mail client.
Notes, blurb
See also
older version
about the transition to the Uni Exchange server.
BEWARE that when you leave the Uni, ICT will disable your
unikey and you will lose access to Uni email.
BEWARE of Office365
Online Archive
settings: they move messages older than some time into some "Online
Archive". You can access this with Outlook or web interface, or via
davmail and
with Thunderbird
(but maybe not other clients?), and not with IMAP as per
Microsoft documentation,
and not with Apple Mail.
Maybe, change the archiving policy using the web interface:
right-click on (each) email folder and choose
Assign Policy > Achive Policy :
Personal never move to archive (Never).
BEWARE of the Outlook
recall
function: messages recalled and still in your Inbox (or other Office365
folders?), will disappear.
BEWARE that ICT will sometimes delete some (bad? virus?)
messages from your mail folders.