DavMail POP/IMAP/SMTP/CalDav/LDAP Exchange Gateway - Frequently asked questions Mickael Guessant

Frequently asked questions on DavMail forums, mailing list or direct email.

How do I create a WIRE debug log ?

In DavMail trackers and forums, I often ask for a WIRE debug log. To create this log file, you will need to change DavMail settings under the advanced tab. Set the WIRE logging category to DEBUG level.

You can then reproduce you issue and send the log file to mguessan@free.fr

The davmail.log file is available in DavMail working directory on Unix and Windows, ~/Library/Logs/DavMail/davmail.log on OSX. This default path can be customized with the Log File Path setting.

Authentication fails with invalid user or password message

Authentication fails with the following message: Authentication failed: invalid user or password, retry with domain\user

Exchange before 2007 expects domain qualified user name, you may not have to provide the domain name on the logon form if javascript is used to add it, but DavMail can not execute javascript. Thus you need to prefix your user name with the Active Directory domain followed by \

Authentication fails with error in parsing the status line

Authentication fails with the following message: error in parsing the status line from the response: unable to find line starting with "HTTP"

Your Exchange server expects HTTPS (secured) connections, use https instead of http in OWA url.

How do I detect errors in Thunderbird/Lightning calendar ?

Unfortunately, Lightning does not provide much feedback of what is going on. To detect errors at this level, you may activate calendar log settings under Tools/Options/Advanced:

calendar.debug.log=true calendar.debug.log.verbose=true

Invalid notifications

Lightning 0.9 mail notifications are broken, activate Caldav notifications to outbox instead:

Check the following parameter in Thunderbird, it should be set to true

calendar.caldav.sched.enabled=true

How to build DavMail ?

Building DavMail is quite simple:

  • Make sure you have Java 6 installed and set as current version by checking JAVA_HOME:
    • Unix/OSX: echo $JAVA_HOME
    • Windows: echo %JAVA_HOME%
  • Download and unzip ant fromant.apache.org, add ant/bin full path to the PATH environment variable
  • Get DavMail source package from sourceforge and uncompress it: tar xvzf davmail-src-*.tgz
    or checkout trunk: svn co http://davmail.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/davmail/trunk
    or get and uncompress tarball from http://davmail.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/davmail/trunk
  • Additional step on Windows: Download and install NSIS from http://nsis.sourceforge.net. Then get KillProcess plugin from http://www.esanu.name/software/index.php/nsis-kill-process/ or the nsis directory in DavMail source. Copy the processwork.dll library to NSIS plugin directory.
  • Go into davmail directory root directory (which contains the build.xml file) and type: ant

Packages are then available under dist