How to back up OWA exchange emails without Outlook

Question

My university uses Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA) e-mail. Soon they will close my e-mail account as my course has ended, but I really do not want to lose the archive of emails and attachments.

I've read a backup to something called a .pst can be made if one has access to Microsoft Outlook but I do not.

Is there any other way I could back these up? (preferably on Ubuntu 12.04 but I also have access to Win 7 if need be).

One idea I played with is using davmail to allow access via Thunderbird and performing some kind of backup with that. However, I cannot seem to get past Authentication failed: invalid user or password, retry with domain\user.

Solution

On Ubuntu, install davmail and follow the instructions on their website for setting up Thunderbird. In particular you may need domain\user rather than just user and I needed davmail.enableEws=false in the properties file. When the OWA mail is working with Thunderbird, go to account settings->copies and folders and set up a local archive. Finally, select mails to back up and archive them to the local folder.

Even better: use the addon ImportExportTools to create local html copies with attachments of all your folders.

Comments

[Thalys]

an ugly option might be to get a trial version of outlook, then use thunderbird to import from that. kb.mozillazine.org/Import_.pst_files has a few options that might be worth testing out as well

[fpghost]

Thanks I will give this a try. I also got Thunderbird and Davmail to work (by setting davmail.enableEws=false). Does Thunderbird automatically make local copies of my mail to my hard drive (will the folders showing now still be there even when the account is closed?, i.e. If I were to just copy the .profile folder and restore it on a different computer) or do I need to explicitly make local copies somehow?

[Thalys]

I believe you can set it to under account settings -> copies and folders. At this rate you're going to self answer, so don't forget to do so once you have worked this out.