Exchange Active Sync Server (EAS)

[Good Guy]

Does new versions of TB support EAS?

I have recently acquired Office 2013 Professional Plus which came with Outlook 2013.  It supports EAS and it is wonderful to use it because you get access to not only your email immediately but also  all your folders, calendar and contacts in one place.   This is fantastic and I wondered if the latest version s of TB has got this.

As you may know, Microsoft has opened up its pop and imap servers for people using its Outlook.com email address with other applications such as TB, etc. and also it supports EAS in Outlook 2013.

[Thomas Boehm]

On 06/04/15 02:00, Good Guy wrote:
> Does new versions of TB support EAS?
>
> I have recently acquired Office 2013 Professional Plus which came with
> Outlook 2013. It supports EAS and it is wonderful to use it because you
> get access to not only your email immediately but also all your
> folders, calendar and contacts in one place. This is fantastic and I
> wondered if the latest version s of TB has got this.

If EAS supports open standards like Caldav and Carddav, then the answer
would be yes. But I doubt it and I'm too lazy to google it...

HTH
Thomas

[Good Guy]

On 06/04/2015 16:46, Thomas Boehm wrote:

 But I doubt it and I'm too lazy to google it...

Even if you weren't lazy, you would not find anything on the net about technologies that are invented by Microsoft.  Google tries its best to keep it away from its search results.

EAS is a relatively old technology but only Microsoft has spent money to develop it and harness the full power of it.  Let's hope Mozilla follows suit and incorporate it in its products otherwise Outlook will be in fashion once again.

EAS in my opinion is very fast and I can access messages on Hotmail, outlook.com and live.  Even getting my contacts and calendar is pretty fast (as if they are on my own machine).  I like it and  I'll continue using it until TB comes out with something else.

[Jim Porter]

On 04/05/2015 08:00 PM, Good Guy wrote:
> Does new versions of TB support EAS?

No, and I doubt it ever will. I'm not a lawyer, but it's my
understanding that distributing software that supports ActiveSync to
users requires that the distributor (read: Mozilla) pay a licensing fee
to Microsoft. Given that Thunderbird is managed almost entirely by
volunteers, any money that could go to licensing ActiveSync would almost
certainly be better spent on paying some people to write code for
Thunderbird.

Also, ActiveSync is a massive pain to support unless you're Microsoft (I
say this as the developer who wrote the initial implementation of
ActiveSync for Firefox OS*). There's very little you can do with
ActiveSync that you can't do better with IMAP/CalDav/CardDav anyway
(assuming you have good software for the client and server).

Sadly, Thunderbird's support for these protocols varies from decent (our
IMAP implementation is pretty good overall but is missing some important
features) to nonexistent (CardDav, which doesn't really fit into the
existing address book very well). Nevertheless, it would probably be
less work to improve these than it would be to write an ActiveSync
implementation (mostly) from scratch.

- Jim

* I think Firefox OS lets us avoid the licensing fee because it's the
OEMs shipping the phones that have to pay the fee, whereas we wouldn't
be able to do that with Thunderbird. Besides, to be blunt, Firefox OS
has considerably more financial support from Mozilla than Thunderbird.

[Good Guy]

Thank you Jim for the considerate reply.  I am now better informed from your post.

Thank you once again.

[itsunny]

EAS is Microsoft proprietary and is licensed by Microsoft.
To support EAS, Mozilla would have to pay a few $ per user per year
(like other editors/device makers/...). It is the reason why Google
stopped to support EAS.
This is good earnings for MS just for publishing a protocol !
TB must support better open standards like calDAV, cardDAV, ...