Accessing an inbox using OWA/EWS

Note

Starting in 8.0.0, parsedmarc supports accessing Microsoft/Office 365 inboxes via the Microsoft Graph API, which is preferred over Davmail.

Some organizations do not allow IMAP or the Microsoft Graph API, and only support Exchange Web Services (EWS)/Outlook Web Access (OWA). In that case, Davmail will need to be set up as a local EWS/OWA IMAP gateway. It can even work where Modern Auth/multi-factor authentication is required.

To do this, download the latest davmail-version.zip from https://sourceforge.net/projects/davmail/files/

Extract the zip using the unzip command.

Install Java:

sudo apt-get install default-jre-headless

Configure Davmail by creating a davmail.properties file

# DavMail settings, see http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ for documentation

#############################################################
# Basic settings

# Server or workstation mode
davmail.server=true

# connection mode auto, EWS or WebDav
davmail.enableEws=auto

# base Exchange OWA or EWS url
davmail.url=https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx

# Listener ports
davmail.imapPort=1143

#############################################################
# Network settings

# Network proxy settings
davmail.enableProxy=false
davmail.useSystemProxies=false
davmail.proxyHost=
davmail.proxyPort=
davmail.proxyUser=
davmail.proxyPassword=

# proxy exclude list
davmail.noProxyFor=

# block remote connection to DavMail
davmail.allowRemote=false

# bind server sockets to the loopback address
davmail.bindAddress=127.0.0.1

# disable SSL for specified listeners
davmail.ssl.nosecureimap=true

# Send keepalive character during large folder and messages download
davmail.enableKeepalive=true

# Message count limit on folder retrieval
davmail.folderSizeLimit=0

#############################################################
# IMAP settings

# Delete messages immediately on IMAP STORE \Deleted flag
davmail.imapAutoExpunge=true

# Enable IDLE support, set polling delay in minutes
davmail.imapIdleDelay=1

# Always reply to IMAP RFC822.SIZE requests with Exchange approximate
# message size for performance reasons
davmail.imapAlwaysApproxMsgSize=true

# Client connection timeout in seconds - default 300, 0 to disable
davmail.clientSoTimeout=0

#############################################################

Running DavMail as a systemd service

Use systemd to run davmail as a service.

Create a system user

sudo useradd davmail -r -s /bin/false

Protect the davmail configuration file from prying eyes

sudo chown root:davmail /opt/davmail/davmail.properties
sudo chmod u=rw,g=r,o= /opt/davmail/davmail.properties

Create the service configuration file

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/davmail.service

[Unit]
Description=DavMail gateway service
Documentation=https://sourceforge.net/projects/davmail/
Wants=network-online.target
After=syslog.target network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/opt/davmail/davmail /opt/davmail/davmail.properties
User=davmail
Group=davmail
Restart=always
RestartSec=5m

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then, enable the service

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable parsedmarc.service
sudo service davmail restart

Note

You must also run the above commands whenever you edit davmail.service.

Warning

Always restart the service every time you upgrade to a new version of davmail:

sudo service davmail restart

To check the status of the service, run:

service davmail status

Note

In the event of a crash, systemd will restart the service after 5 minutes, but the service davmail status command will only show the logs for the current process. To vew the logs for previous runs as well as the current process (newest to oldest), run:

journalctl -u davmail.service -r

Configuring parsedmarc for DavMail

Because you are interacting with DavMail server over the loopback (i.e. 127.0.0.1), add the following options to parsedmarc.ini config file:

[imap]
host=127.0.0.1
port=1143
ssl=False
watch=True