[Gllug] Evolution mail client on Debian

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Thu, 2002-10-31 at 00:31, Steve Nicholson wrote:
> Hi.
> I've been playing with Evolution for Imap mail and calendaring and it
> seems a little rough, so thought I would check on others experiences
> before I give up on it.  It has been better than slypheed for me so far
> but not quit good enough to commit to yet.  Every now and again it
> freezes up on me like tonight when I selected to load the images in a
> html message. This appears to be the mail client side of things because
> when I kill it Evolution is available again although have to restart it
> to get the mail working.  The reminder messages for the calendar don't
> seem to work, no sounds are played if selected and the popup message box
> freezes only showing the background window (this maybe to do with using
> ION window manager).  No spell checker for Debian running under woody.

I'm using Evolution 1.0.5 on Debian (testing, with some unstable). My
feelings on it are mixed, but I think on the whole it's a decent client.
I have not had stability problems, other than that it occasionally
refuses to die properly when I close it, but that's a relatively minor
irritation. I use it with a Cyrus IMAP server. Spell checking doesn't
appear to work, as you mentioned. On my old RedHat/Ximian GNOME setup,
spell check worked fine, so I suspect this has something to do with the
Debian package.

My niggles with it are:-

1/ Calendar and Contacts are local folders. This is brain dead when
using the client for IMAP mail only. I'd like to be able to remove local
folders entirely - as is, I get an annoying load of clutter in the
folder pane every time I look at the calendar/contacts list.
 
2/ No obvious way to disable the formatting bar on compose windows. I
*never* want to send HTML mail, and I'd like to get rid of it.

3/ No apparent way to set arbitrary email headers.

4/ Threading is broken. If you thread a folder, and then sort the
listing window in reverse chronological order, the thread contents are
also sorted reverse chronologically. Every other mail client I've used
that supports threading can manage to do this right, and sort the
threads reverse chronologically, but the thread contents
chronologically. Evolution buggers them up.

5/ Sort order of folders. INBOX sorts under "i", not (as in every other
mail client) at the top of the list. This is down right irritating.
IMHO, "special" folders (inbox, sent, drafts, trash, templates) should
sort at the head of the list, before standard folders.

> Is it me, my system, bad luck (I get a lot of this) or Evolution not
> quit ready yet?

It got better very rapidly until sometime shortly after the 1.0 release,
but since then no one seems to have bothered fixing the remaining
annoyances. I submitted a feature request for proper threading ages ago,
but no-one seems to have bothered to fix what is to me a large bug.
 
I've used Evolution for quite a while now, but use Mozilla for mail at
work. The Mozilla mail client has steadily crept up on Evolution in
terms of features and configurability to the stage where it now seems to
be a slightly better client in most ways. GPG integration is the one
nice feature that Evolution still has going for it over Moz. Otherwise,
I'm still using it out of inertia, and good-enough factor. At some stage
I may well switch. For now, I have both set up (I do like IMAP), and
occasionally use Moz (when I click mailto: links).

My 2p worth,

Mike.


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