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EvolutionEvolutionPosted Nov 27, 2008 22:44 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)Parent article: GNOME 2.24.2 released
<rant>
Whatever you do, stay away from Evolution for mail. Not only does it crash and cannot see mail when connected to Exchange, but it has trouble with IMAP too (did I mention it was slow when getting mail?). I have no idea if anyone actually does any testing of Evo before releasing it. I could swear not. This release is orders of magnitude worse than the previous one. </rant>
Before you ask, yes, I did file bugs. And yes, I'll keep using it (for now), because I'm a patient man :-)
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Evolution Posted Nov 28, 2008 0:15 UTC (Fri) by flammon (guest, #807) [Link]
Ah man... I stopped using Evolution a few years ago because it crashed so much and I could not stand it anymore and now you're saying that not only has it not improved but it's getting worse! Saddening, because it really has potential. If only it could stop crashing.
De-evolution Posted Nov 28, 2008 2:31 UTC (Fri) by abatters (✭ supporter ✭, #6932) [Link]
Same thing here. It's natural selection, you know.
Evolution Posted Nov 28, 2008 3:39 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
I'm stuck with Evo for the following reasons:
- knows how to do GSSAPI auth to IMAP
I tried (unsuccessfully) claws-mail and balsa for the IMAP stuff (cannot do that at work at all - Exchange admins refuse to turn IMAP on - lucky I get OWA).
Just out of curiosity, what do you normally use?
PS. Evo is one of those things that, if done properly, could be really, really good. But, the quality of the releases varies greatly. Previous Evo (2.22) was kinda OK (it would still crash occasionally when used with Exchange - especially on big folders). I'm looking forward to MAPI support on that front.
Evolution Posted Nov 28, 2008 6:38 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
IMAP support for Exchange is shit. You don't want it. Also there is security issues with trying to get IMAP working and requires extra work and vigilance on the part of admins. It's no surprise that admins are not wanting to support it. I wouldn't want to take a kerberos domain and try to degrade it's security by adding IMAP for Linux compatibility.
OWA is also shit. The web interface for Exchange is unreliable and locks up continuously for myself and anybody that uses it. It's just very bad. That's the web interface _being_used_as_a_web_interface_ and not a hack to get Evolution to pretend it has Exchange compatibility. It's not surprising to me that Exchange support in Evolution makes Evolution run like crap. You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear. OWA by itself is shit, expecting OWA + Evolution to be anything else is just pure wishful thinking.
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What you want is native MAPI support. This means using the client support that Exchange has that is, you know, is designed to be used by clients.
This also means that you have AD intergration, some SAMBA 4 stuff, and the whole ten yards. A Outlook replacement for the Linux desktop, not a second-class imap pretender (after all, if Exchange was just about email then it would be a easy kill for the OSS community) or alternative front-end to the web interface.
Of course this required functionality is not yet present in Evolution. It should be in Gnome 2.26 though and is probably one of the more important features for the Gnome desktop in a long time.
Thank goodness for OpenChange (not to be confused with other projects like Open Exchange) and Samba4 for providing this sort of minimal functionality that is expected to be present in modern business desktops.
Evolution Posted Nov 28, 2008 8:50 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
> IMAP support for Exchange is shit.
I ran Evo against IMAP in Exchange at a larger organisation than the one I'm at now and it was a bit better then OWA. Of course, what kind of pain Windows admins had to go through to make that work, I don't know (and don't care :-).
> OWA is also shit.
Yeah, no kidding. Typical MS play. They supposedly support common protocols, browsers etc., but in the end none of the compatible stuff actually works and one is forced to use proprietary stuff.
Let's see what MAPI support brings.
Evolution Posted Nov 28, 2008 13:15 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
I've been using GMail for a very long time, and MS Outlook at work, but recently I've been moving to KMail/Kontact from SVN. It's not incredibly stable yet, but it gives me high hopes for a final release with KDE 4.2. Beta 1 is probably worth a look.
Evolution Posted Nov 29, 2008 3:41 UTC (Sat) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]
Indeed. The akonadi/kmail setup works well with gmail. I couldn't reliably
use it previously.
Derek
Evolution Posted Dec 1, 2008 11:31 UTC (Mon) by janpla (guest, #11093) [Link]
I use Thunderbird at home and the Exchange Server's web interface at work.
Thunderbird because: it works well enough, it allows me to never see HTML mail, the SPAM filter and probably several more reasons.
The web interface because: some brilliant mind has decided that Sarbanes- Oxley somehow makes it mandatory that the IMAP port is not open, and I just can't stand the pain of using Evolution.
What I would really love to see is Thunderburp being able to connect to Exchange Server even when it doesn't use POP3 or IMAP.
Evolution Posted Nov 28, 2008 2:16 UTC (Fri) by dilinger (subscriber, #2867) [Link]
I wish Claws were more gnome-aware, but it still makes a great replacement for Evolution in a gnome environment.
Evolution Posted Nov 28, 2008 3:58 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
I've used Evolution as my primary email client with both uw-imap and google's imap servers. Works great for me. I also have 60+ users using it for pop3. I'm surprised at all the negativity in this thread. We don't use Exchange. So I can't comment on that.
I enjoy its integration with the Gnome desktop and find that Evolution/Epiphany are a substantial win for memory consumption compared to Thunderbird/Firefox on my Gnome desktops.
Evolution Posted Nov 28, 2008 6:50 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Ya. Exchange is 'teh sux'. Very difficult to work with if your not Microsoft.
Out of different email clients I've tried probably the only GUI ones that I personally would consider using is probably Evolution, Balsa, or Thunderbird. I've tried stuff like Claws and Sypheed, but they tend to make dealing with html-formatted email way to difficult or are otherwise to 'elite' for me to be comfortable to work with. (keep in mind that html-formatted email is a swear-to-god internet standard) Other people will probably like them, but it's just not my speed.
It should end up being better when Gnome gets webkit support into Evolution and friends and gets rid of the old gtkhtml stuff.
Evolution Posted Nov 28, 2008 8:40 UTC (Fri) by SiB (subscriber, #4048) [Link]
> (keep in mind that html-formatted email is a swear-to-god internet standard)
Yes, just like SPAM is. And it's being routed to the same folder :-)
HTML formatted mail Posted Nov 29, 2008 3:58 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (keep in mind that html-formatted email is a swear-to-god internet standard) I almost never see HTML-formatted mail. I suppose I get sent quite a bit of it, but luckily almost all mail clients that send HTML mail send it as multipart/alternative with a corresponding text/plain part. My mail server notices this, strips out the text/html, and everything is tickety-boo. Plus my mail archive is less than half the size it would be otherwise.
HTML formatted mail Posted Nov 29, 2008 7:59 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
The biggest reason I use html text is for emails from grandma. :)
Evolution Posted Nov 28, 2008 8:52 UTC (Fri) by Rehdon (guest, #45440) [Link]
I've also been using Evolution for years, both with POP3 and IMAP accounts, and while it's not perfect it surely does it job. I experienced random crashes with the 2.22 version, only minor glitches with the 2.24.1 one I'm using now.
Sure, it seems that development is crawling, I'd really like better IMAP support and Google-like conversations.
Rehdon
Evolution Posted Nov 28, 2008 21:50 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
I've also used Evolution for years, but it definitely has _not_ worked great. Crashes weren't too common, but anything more often than "never" is too often for me. Usually Evolution would have more subtle -- but equally data-destroying -- bugs, such as lock ups in the editor, drag-n-drop of messages causing a lockup (which in turn made the whole damn X session unusable, since the X grab was still in effect), and so on.
Switching to Thunderbird has made my life so much nicer.
Evolution Posted Dec 1, 2008 9:43 UTC (Mon) by zzxtty (subscriber, #45175) [Link]
A few years ago Evolution was very unstable, now however it appears very stable (currently running under Ubuntu). I use IMAP to talk to an Exchange server which can at times be very slow, but I suspect the server is overloaded as even the native Exchange users complain about it being unresponsive.
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