TL;DR: Skip the next few paragraphs until you see “The Fix”
What a shitty title, but you had to find my post somehow. At my work, we use Exchange for internal mail and calendar stuff, which is fine. In pastimes, I’d use IMAP clients like Evolution or Thunderbird to connect to our exchange server, and do mail like that… but as time went on I grew tired of how sloppy those mail clients are. I can’t pinpoint the exact grudge I have against them, except that it’s just multiple usability issues which ended up pissing me off and moving me to use Outlook Web Access, also known as OWA.
Being the techie guy that I am, I like to use bleeding-edge whatever of as much as possible. Chromium beta channel for Ubuntu, then. This fix works for any version of chromium/chrome on Ubuntu, so don’t worry. Anyway, the problem with this is that Microsoft only supports a heavily nerfed version of Outlook Web Access (they call it Lite) for Chromium on Ubuntu. For a long time I was OK with that: The bells and whistles of the Deluxe version were too much for me.. so I coped. But with time, it got to the point where that annoyed me as well.
The Outlook Web Access Lite client doesn’t make use of any kind of scripting or advanced features anywhere it matters! It’s all plain HTML for that client. You can’t select multiple mails at once (one click per email) or anything like that. EXCEPT: When someone sends you a file that Outlook recognizes. I’m specifically thinking about attached mail files sent from other Outlook clients. Then you’re in for a fucking treat. Web access suddenly FORGETS that it’s a dumb html web interface and employs advanced techniques intended to make it as fucking hard as possible for you to just get the plain file and let you view the message headers: No no no, that would be too much to expect. You’re supposed to view the file as an Email, in Outlook Web Access Lite. What fucking cuntface decided to make that mandatory? It is in no way possible to download the email file to your computer. Fuck that shit. If I’m forced to use fancy features anyhow, I’m gonna want to use them all at once. Which leads me to…
The Fix
Go to http://ip.nixy.dk?useragent and copy the second line to your favourite text editor. It shoud look something like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/11.10 Chromium/17.0.963.79 Chrome/17.0.963.79 Safari/535.11
Now change the part that says (X11; Linux x86_64) to be (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) and delete Ubuntu/11.10 (this could be different depending on what version of Ubuntu you’re running. Just delete it, for good measure)
Now go find yourself a User Agent Spoofer for your Chromium. I use this one, seing as it’s the first thing to come up in a google search. Go to the settings screen for the extension. Enter your custom User Agent in the list of Custom User Agents, and add your Outlook Web Access to the Permanent Spoof list.
You’re done! Go play with your fancy OWA. :)