Once upon a time, there was an Exchange Connector for the Linux email client Evolution, and it was fairly good. Basically an OWA screen-scraper, it enabled Evolution to function as a Linux equivalent to Outlook, and (based upon my admittedly limited tinkering with it) it seemed to get the job done.

Then along came Exchange 2007, which changed how OWA worked, thus breaking the Exchange Connector. Linux users needing to connect to Exchange were faced with being restricted to POP3 or IMAP4 (assuming their Exchange admins had those legacy protocols turned on), using OWA (which is pretty limited in a non-IE environment), or running Outlook in a Windows VM.

But there are other options these days. In addition to the dramatically improved cross-browser OWA found in Exchange 2010, there is a MAPI plugin for Revolution! I’ve not yet tinkered with it, but this opens up quite a few options.