I really like Open Source software and would like have completely Open Source desktop at work, as I have at home. Our company uses Exchange mail server and since our admins switched to newer Exchange mail server 2007 there wasn’t an option to use anything but Microsoft Outlook for reading email on Linux desktop:(
 
Since evolution-mapi project got started I got really happy because it promised full Exchange 2007 compatibility, so that I could again use 100% Open Source desktop.
 
I tried it causally when Fedora 10 and 11 launched but knowing that the project was still fresh I didn’t expect much. Now that Fedora 12 with Gnome 2.28 launched I really hoped that evolution-mapi got stable enough for real use. Unfortunately there are some bugs that prevent international users from using Evolution. It is so close to being a perfect solution for lots of us who have to use Exchange, and that “almost there” feeling makes it even more frustrating :)
 
I know that lots of great hackers are working on fixing this solution, and we all are thankful for their contribution. I’m asking myself can we, regular users, donate and make some online actions so that we also get companies donate? Hopefully that would help the project in getting these issues fixed faster.
 
Do you have other/better suggestion how to help developers?
 
These are the mentioned bugs :
Mail is in the wrong encoding
unable to send mails containing UTF8 strings