More generally, I've found in the past that "open source connectors etc to Exchange" support tends to be or become abandonware, because generally the kind of person who writes that sort of addon/integration doesn't really like working in the sort of environment which mandates Exchange and locks it down, and so after a few years when they move on to a new job that doesn't require them to use Exchange the addon becomes abandonware because the original author no longer needs it. So it probably does need to be either Mozilla taking it on as a "we must support this" feature or somebody like Beonex making it a paid product.
That's the short answer to the question.
A longer answer: the underlying Exchange protocol is another IMAP-level of complexity of protocol, and the IMAP protocol implementation in Thunderbird is itself running somewhere in the 50KLOC region. On top of that, the protocol itself (I believe) largely works in Outlook's not-a-regular-RFC 822-email-message representation, which means you need to build in a translation layer to make it work well. Finally, a lot of the logic in Thunderbird isn't really designed for pluggable account types, and that it's even possible to a degree is up to work that rkent and I did to make it barely possible for extensions to do so; incorporating the code in core would require properly fixing several of the places rather than continuing the various levels of hacks in place.
Now what's the benefit of adding it core? If you're using TB for your small/medium enterprise, then the better answer is to just switch on IMAP access on the server, which is much better supported in TB (and other clients). So the value-add is comparatively minimal, especially compared to doing something like supporting JMAP (which is somewhat closer to a sane modernization of IMAP than EWS is). It's going to rank lower priority than other fixes, then, especially given the technical debt TB suffers from.
That all makes sense, I think the reason my uni refuse to allow normal IMAP is because they’re trying to enforce 2FA-only access to their systems, which could become more common down the line.
Then I can use whichever client I like. Otherwise it's just bouncing between which client has had the exchange plugins updated most recently.
As a bonus, it's distributed as a jar, so you can download and run for the latest support, even on an LTS of a Linux distro
Can you accept/reject meeting invites with it? The Tbsync extension that I am using does not have this feature.
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I noticed I'm running it with "java -Xmx512M" which probably explains the half-GB of ram usage. It's possible that if I increased that value it would perform better with large folders, but I keep my inbox fairly reasonable and I don't care if the other folders take a bit of time to sync.
Also, FWIW, it's the 10th largest item in my top listing, with even Thunderbird using more RAM (850MB). I suspect mutt, offlineimap and davmail would combine to be smaller than TB alone.
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Also consider getting your employer to buy you more RAM? A 32GB SO-DIMM kit from corsair is under $200, so nobody should have to worry about half a gig on their work machine...
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