Evolution appears unable to store mail account details

Question

I am trying to set up Evolution with Exchange so I can bypass Windows for a bunch of office stuff. The problem I have is that when I set up my account, Evolution just doesn't seem to be able to store it. I provide the information, it seems to connect correctly, but then when I get to the end of the wizard there is no account configured. If I start Evolution again I get the wizard again.

This was a straight install of evolution and evolution-ews out of apt on a pretty much brand new 14.04 installation running Xubuntu on the front.

I couldn't see any logs for Evolution so I ran it with CAMEL_DEBUG=true evolution to get a bit of debugging and the first few lines look like this:

** (evolution:14167): WARNING **: Couldn't connect to accessibility bus: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-wLqFGe8c5K: Connection refused

(evolution:14167): camel-WARNING **: Failed to initialize NSS SQL database in sql:/etc/pki/nssdb: NSS error -8187

** (evolution-alarm-notify:14173): WARNING **: Couldn't connect to accessibility bus: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-wLqFGe8c5K: Connection refused

Database succesfully opened

This appears to be what was happening during the wizard, then once the wizard ends we get some regular behaviour where it creates databases and stuff.

It turns out that the next time I logged in, Evolution had the same account created four times, so apparently there was some problem there that it bypassed. It still can't retrieve messages from Exchange so it's as useful as a chocolate teapot, but this issue is kind of limited.

Solution

Maybe your problem is related to this confirmed bug (Please indicate that the bug affects you, the bug heat will increase). A possible workaround which worked for many is found in comment 35:
"I was experiencing this exact same bug as well. Based on information I read in the corresponding RedHat report (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=879773) I was able to get this to work by removing all the Evolution configuration directories (which did have some prior attempts at configuration from a long time ago) and killing and restarting Evolution:
[Fri Aug 8 10:02:25 EDT 2014] > mike at ossy in ~
rm -rf .config/evolution/ .cache/evolution/ .local/share/evolution/
[Fri Aug 8 10:02:40 EDT 2014] > mike at ossy in ~
pkill evolution
I went through the account wizard again, and after adding the password prompt showed up and I was able to type the password and add the account."

I also had the same issue as you did, but did not need to delete all the configuration fortunately. After login/-out of the session, gnome keyring would ask me for the passwords again and then the EWS-accounts would work fine. I just deleted the duplicate accounts as I tried several times to set it up.

Comments

[Ron Smith]

Did you ever resolve this issue? I seem to have the same problem.

[glenatron]

@RonSmith the solution I ended up going for in order to use Exchange successfully was Outlook in a Windows VM. I couldn't find any way to make Evolution talk to it and honestly I didn't have time to waste on researching and configuring it.

[Randall]

Logging out and back in to the desktop manager showed the account I had just created. This was under Evolution 3.28.5 (with evolution-ews)