Comment 63 for bug 207723

Another annoying "I got it to work but I'm not quite sure how" post:

I had the same problem this morning when I reinstalled a system with 8.10, upgraded everything and tried to set up evolution again (without just copying in the settings). As an aside, I initially googled for the keystore error, but that's actually a different bug, it just means that evolution won't store your password. It's annoying but not fatal. Other sites also recommend Thunderbird, but it doesn't do Exchange calendars, so it's not a solution to this.

So I followed the tips above, removed my username and re-authenticated, which didn't work initially. I puzzled over the username field, it seems to want a forward slash, but then the login box after that has a backslash, and the domains at my work seem to be uppercase a lot, so I tried a bit of CAPITAL/username, CAPITAL\username lowercase\username etc. No avail.

It nearly worked, as above, the actual settings screen asks you to authenticate and that appears to actually work and retrieve your mailbox name, which it could only know if it had worked, but then opening the mail account didn't work. I logged into webmail itself to make sure that was working and at the address I was putting into the settings, which it is.

So after failing a lot, here's what I think I did:
disabled the account
put in my username as CAPITAL/username
put in the webmail url (http://ukmail.<mydomain>.com/exchange/) - the trailing slash REALLY shouldn't affect this, but who knows, someone above seems to have changed that too, but the other way round. I hit authenticate and it worked, then saved it, re-enabled the check box for the account and it seemed to work. No idea why really.

So perhaps settings get cached along with the URL in evolution and not cleared properly, and that's why adding or removing a slash can suddenly make it work, if you've fixed the username or something else along the way. Pure speculation though. From all this, the Evolution Exchange connector seems to be incredibly flaky, but considering it just uses http to the web client app, it's probably something like string parsing issues making it really fragile to reconfigure.

Work appears to be using Microsoft Exchange 2003, if any absolute champion out there wants to try to fix this I can get more details and snapshots of the data being returned from the server, whatever you like.