Exchained

Adam Biko

About this app

This app will unbind you from Exchange ActiveSync policies and bypass them. This means that you will be able to access your Exchange mailbox via ActiveSync using unmodified native android mail apps without granting remote administration permissions to the Exchange server and without rooting the device. The app lets you also customize some of the device info data exposed by the email client.

The app supports multiple accounts on multiple Exchange servers. You need a valid account and prior access to your Exchange server as Exchained cannot obtain that for you, also it won't work with Exchange accounts that require a client certificate which is typical when the device is controlled by an MDM solution, such as Microsoft Intune.

Currently tested mail clients:
- Android AOSP native client
- Gmail app
- Samsung's "E-mail" app and Samsung Focus
- BlackBerry Hub
- Nine, Boxer, Mail Wise,

Other mail clients may or may not work: the app should work with most Exchange ActiveSync clients that are based on the Android Exchange libraries and that let you configure the scheme/server/port of the Exchange server (which excludes the "Outlook" Android app as it always uses an https scheme). It can also be useful, when using multiple Exchange ActiveSync client apps, to limit the number of active partnerships seen by the server.

PLEASE NOTE that, if you don't have access to your Exchange server via ActiveSync, Exchained cannot magically obtain that for you. If you have access and can get the emails, Exchained can hide the ActiveSync policies. However if you don't have a valid account, or Exchange has been configured to require a portal or MDM pre-authorization or allow only some specific devices, or block e.g. your mail client, or the ActiveSync protocol, or HTTP authentication, etc..., all these things are outside Exchained's control. While these can be generally seen as "policies", they are not the "ActiveSync policies" that Exchained can handle.

The app doesn't provide or implement any part of the Exchange ActiveSync protocol itself (either server or client), it doesn't even decode the Exchange XML messages, it just performs smart search&replace actions on the traffic flow between a third-party mail client app and the Exchange server. Therefore the app is tiny and uses negligible resources on your mobile device.

Tested Exchange server versions: 2016 [v15.1] (including Office365), 2013 [v15.0]; Exchange 2010 and earlier are NOT supported.

Tested ActiveSync versions: 14.1, 16

Customizable device info: DeviceType, DeviceId and UserAgent.

Please read instructions at https://sites.google.com/site/bikomobi/exchained before purchasing the app.

Ratings and reviews

I bought this last night and then refunded it after making a couple attempts to get it to work. Then I realized that it wasn't the app, it was me or rather it seems that making multiple attempt, with varying combinations of resetting your Exchained and deleting your Exchange account if you already set it up, are necessary to get it to hand-shake properly. And now I have the personal satisfaction of not having my school tell me what I can and can't do on my phone (i.e leave it without a security modality when I don't need it) nor are they able to remote wipe my phone without warning etc.. Of course the latter has never happened and probably never will, the fact that they force me to give them that power is unnerving. So the app works and has been running seamlessly in the background for several days now. I recently switched from iOS and didn't realize the conditions I was agreeing to in setting up my school email account on my phone. I re-installed the account on the iPhone recently and noticed that they only refer to my institution for a description of what I was actually doing whereas with Android OS the conditions are explicitly laid out.

The updated Samsung email app doesn't allow the manual setup needed, and I haven't set it up with Nine because I can disable _bindadmin receivers and override security policy to disable permissions, bypassing Knox (not rooted). The problem was that when using the previous Samsung email, I also turned off all Knox apps at the time I was using Exchained, and I was sending unencrypted emails, which got me flagged. Moral: don't turn off Knox at the same time. 5 stars because it does work though.

[EDIT] Works great! Initially it seemed that the app was not working properly but that was user error. I am using Nine email and I attempted to set up Exchained for it. The latest version of Nine does not require any special configuration with Exchained. I now have the double security that I wanted; a passcode to unlock the phone and a passcode to unlock my Corporate email.

What's new

bug fixes and performance improvements