Evolution 0.99, Release Candidate Out

savaget writes "Evolution 0.99 (Release Candidate 1) is out! "Yes, you read that right: the release candidate for Evolution 1.0 hit the wires this evening. After two years of hard work and more than 700 thousand lines of code written, the sleepless hackers at Ximian are finally getting to the long-awaited 1.0 release of Evolution, the GNOME groupware suite."" One of the most important projects in the open source world today. Best of luck to the monkey boys @ Ximian squashing any last minute arrivals.

Comments

Full annoucement here

[savaget]

Full annoucement here

Evolution project homepage is here

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.ximian.com/products/ximian_evolution/

http://www.ximian.com/products/ximian_evolution/

Trial Installs...

[FatRatBastard]

I like Evolution a lot, and its become my e-mail client of choice as of late (well, when my machine's memory isn't going up in smoke that is) but I was wondering if anyone has done any evalutions of Evolution on a large scale basis.

I.e. has anyone in a company been testing to see how well it plays with existing back end infrastructure (Exchange, etc)? How well does it play with others? Which features does it not play with well? Where does it need more work? Ect.

Re:Trial Installs...

[MasterD]

My company will be rolling out PR1 to all it's employees on Linux and Solaris which is about 90%. We have an Exchange backend (don't ask) and Evolution works great with it. We use IMAP for mail, LDAP for contacts. And the calendering stuff we use Lookout for the web, *but* Evolution can receive the iCal requests and schedule them on a user's local calendar. This is our only complaint -- Evolution cannot see the Exchange calendar backend, thus a manager cannot see the schedules of his/her employees or other colleages.

In our beta tests with a few managers and directors (these guys are not your normal Linux hackers), they have been very pleased. As the new Evolution betas came out, they were psyched to see more functionality and less bugs. Evolution combined with the Crossover plugin, so they can read MS DOC and PPT and XLS attachments is going to save us $500 a seat since we do not need Citrix licenses (except to edit MS formats, which is only about 10% of the time spent in Citrix after our studies). So all in all, Evolution is a great replacement for Lookout. And the Crossover plugin (with Citrix as a backup) allow us to mostly rid ourselves of M$ desktops.

-tduffy

ps. Citrix is a UNIX client that allows you to connect and run a Windows desktop in an X window.

Port to Mac OS X?

[CokeBear]

Any plans to port to Mac OS X?
Would instantly have 10 times the potential market...

Re:Port to Mac OS X?

[fizz-beyond]

What interestes me more is if there is any plans to port to any other OS in general? lets think about this for a second... They have an opensource mail client which does almost everything that outlook does (almost being that it cannot connect to MSexchange server through the propriatary MS way). If they ported it to other OS's including Mac OS X, and windows they might be able to steal some of Outlooks userbase. that and well bye bye email viruses...

Already available on Red Carpet.

[Picass0]

I did a Red Carpet update a few days ago and my Evolution now says it's ver .99 release candidate 1. Just to get rid of the "Thank you for using..." nag screen it's worth the upgrade.

long time poster, first time user

[the_rev_matt]

Seriously though, I've been using Evo since the .5 days and have enjoyed watching the advances in stability and feature set. Sure, it's no pine, but it's stable and offers all the functionality I need to convince my wife to try linux instead of winblows (she swears by Eudora and won't use anything else, no matter how much she complains when her Win2k box crashes several times/week).

As someone who has hated Outlook for a long time..

[Teancom]

I just can't get over the interface. Yes, yes, I know, it's "intuitive" (read: familiar to people who've used Outlook), it's just doesn't match the way I work. As a long-time hater of the KDE 1.x line (ugly, windows-based crap) I never thought there would come the day that I would drop Gnome and/or E in favor of KDE, but that day has come (and gone, I switched over 6 months ago). KMail is the only mail client I've used in linux that approaches Eudora in ease of use *and* features. Ingo, Marc, and Michael have crafted a nice, stable, mail client. Evolution would do well to get to the same level.

That said, GO GNOME! If they can win me back on technical merits, rock on. I've tried evolution a few times in the past, and (like moz) people keep saying "try the latest nightlies! they are *so* much better!". Well, when they do reach 1.0, I'll try them again. Never let it be said I'm not open minded *grin*.

Re:Bloated....?

[Publicus]

What I've heard is that Ximian has some of the strictest guidelines for code style and quality, which is more than I can say about what I've heard of M$. Also, I don't understand your (I didn't say stability :)) remark. Are you saying Outlook is stable and Evolution is not? I wouldn't say that, as someone who has to use Outlook at work. Half the time it doesn't exit cleanly, but who knows, that could be the crappy OS too.

Ximian's work has influenced my distribution choices in the recent past, because it is so good. Does anyone know if the Ximian Destop works with 'woody'? The Ximian site says potato, but I would imagine it would work with woody. I haven't taken the time to try yet.

Known issues

[Alien54]

Of course, people following this all along would know this stuff, but I can see lots of people checking it for the first time, etc getting surpised.

So, as noted:

- In this build only, Palm-OS sychronization is temporarily disabled. It will return in the next release.
- Under certain rare circumstances, IMAP connections over SSL can hang Evolution. We expect to have this issue resolved shortly.

Just in case these things are important to you.

XML-RPC / SOAP

[SnapperHead]

I wonder when / if they will be intrested in working with other projects on an open XML-RPC / SOAP standard for the data access. This way, they could pull there data from a phpGroupWare server, or pull data from any number of projects that support the standards.

There idea would a datastore is IMAP, which makes no sense to me. But, thats how they want to add groupware functionality. I haven't been following the project very close, a few other developers in phpGroupWare have been hounding them.

At any rate, if you would like to see there client work with other open source groupware applications via XML-RPC / SOAP. Start bugging them. :)

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[Fnkmaster]

Hmm, I've found Evolution to be far more stable and usable than KMail. In particular, Evolution's IMAP support is superb. KMail, despite claims to the contrary, does not seem to be happy with large IMAP folders at all, and I have watched it crash and burn once or twice, but it was really the extremely slow startup time while rechecking the entirety of my large IMAP folders. It's just too damned slow on startup. I have used it just fine with POP in the past though, I just think it has a ways to go on the back end support before it is as good as Evolution.

Re:"One of the most important projects..."

[tmark]

Linux is and has always been a server OS and I find it rather amusing that a simple pretty GUI email application is being crowned as "One of the most important projects in the open source world today"

It is amusing. Many die-hard Linux advocates claim that the fact that MS still holds the desktop for the foreseeable future is irrelevant. Yet the way projects like this are being touted whenever there is some progress made suggests inconsistency. As with most chauvinisms, particular points are relevant only to the extent that one's own biases are being advanced.

Re:Bloated....?

[miguel]

Rob Pike said in his talk on `System Research is Irrelevant' that 90 to 95% of the code in Plan9 was
code to cope with standards and not with new innovative ideas (tcp/ip, http, corba, unicode, posix, mime, pop, imap, x).

A similar scenario happens with Evolution. Modern applications like Evolution are expected to deal with all sorts of IMAP servers, with all sorts of configurations, in a bug compatible fashion and with different "interpretations" of the standard.

Apply this across the board: authentication through SASL (being used more and more and being pretty cool as well), S/SMTP, S/IMAP, IMAP, POP, the various mail formats in Unix you need to import. Then add to the mix decoding MIME message s (both well formed, and ill formed, standard compliant and non-standard compliant), then generating correct Mime code.

Adding code to support features like disconnected IMAP, downloading only the headers, or the whole thing, making it useful over dialup lines.

The calendar tracks the iMIP, iTIP, ICalendar specifications. And can talk to Outlook 2000 and Outlook XP (they dont talk between each other, for calendaring, btw). And the list goes on and on.

HTML mail is supported, correctly forwarding messages is supported (in any combination that you want ;-)

Then add pilot syncing to the mix.

So Evolution is big, because it adapts to the needs of modern users. And it has to cope with the needs of different communities.

Evolution will keep growing to address the needs of more people, and will keep improving. We would of course love to get your contributions to optimize it in every possible way.

Miguel.

Evolution Availability Caveat

[sharkey]

Last minute update:

Evolution (any release) not permitted on computers owned or operated by schools or students in the State of Kansas.

Working with Exchange?

[update()]

I've tried Evolution and it works nicely, although I prefer a Eudora/KMail style interface for my own use.

What I'm confused about is to what degree it does or doesn't work with Exchange. It's such an obvious Outlook clone and the web site brags about how it "works alongside messaging systems such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes." so I was hoping my wife could use it to replace the web interface to Exchange on her Solaris workstation. (It's not so bad when you have IE available, but it's clunky with Konqueror and awful in Communicator or Mozilla.)

It seems, though, that Evolution supports vCard and the calendar standard (forget its name) but the Exchange mail support is limited to IMAP and POP. Is that right or am I missing something?

By the way, for the people squabbling about Evolution vs KMail -- they're different things. I prefer the lighter interface without features I don't need but it's an apple and orange comparison.

Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Ars-Fartsica]

More and more these days, linux projects are rejecting the canons of classic unix design - keep it small, keep it simple, sensibly limit the tasks solved by the code, integrate well with other utilities using simple interfaces.

Following these rules does not mean using mutt on the console - you can enjoy a GUI experience without creating bloatware. KMail is a great example of this - it reads and sends mail with a simple interface that does not attempt to solve an integrated problem.

Unfortunately so many linux projects have become so obsessed with attracting Windows users (why? Do we really expect these people to switch over? Get real!) that linux environments are becoming as fractured as Windows.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Syberghost]

Unfortunately so many linux projects have become so obsessed with attracting Windows users (why? Do we really expect these people to switch over? Get real!)

It isn't about inducing Windows home users to switch over; it's about convincing management that they don't have to inflict Windows on us at work.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Anonymous Coward]

Do we really expect these people to switch over?

I did.

Anyway... I understand your point (knowing more about Unix history now than I did then), but the question is where do you draw the line? less was much more than more many ages back, which in turn was much more than cat. Should they have not made it because it did more than solve an extremely simple problem? pine can send emails but also has an address book. That's a lot more than the mail command can do for you. Is that too much integration? Don't get me started on Emacs. So Evolution gives you mail, an address book, and a calendar (and the Summary page, aka My Evolution, but we'll ignore that for the purposes of this discussion). One could easily argue that a calendar needs to be with your email (suits will anyway - that's how they plan their lives - get an email, add the meeting discussed in the email to their calendar, set an alarm for it, then when it's almost time for their meeting and they're sitting there reading dirty joke emails from their buddies, the alarm kicks off and away they go to their meeting).

What it comes down to is are you talking about a "simple task" from the perspective of a human or a computer? That was rhetorical, you were talking about a computer. The problem is computers weren't invented for the benefit of other computers. Computers were invented for the benefit of humans. The purpose of modern software design is to make using this extremely complex piece of science and technology easier for the masses who don't understand what resistors and capacitors are or what their bearing is on how the machine works. They just want it to do "things" - human "things" like send an email, not computer "things" like pipe the contents of that file to stdout. That is what Evolution is for. And I like it.

End treatise.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[gouldtj]

Actually I would say that in many ways that Evolution embraces these philosophies. 'Evolution' is really no more than a collection of utilities, all tied together. If you run Evolution you'll notice that there are about three or four different applications running tied into one shell. So while you might think of Evolution as 'one application' in reality it is not - it is a shell to use little applications that happen to be developed by the same developers (not all, but many).

I know that these guys are big Bonobo fans, and I am too. What that creates is a return of the Unix design philosophy to the GUI. Small applications can be embedded to create larger applications. Look at GnuCash: you could say that all the really needed is a ledger to manage data. In someways that would be true. But then they attached it to Guppi, and, now you can graph your data too! Think of it like a pipe that is much easier to use :)

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[tswinzig]

Unfortunately so many linux projects have become so obsessed with attracting Windows users

Maybe they're not trying to attract Windows users. Maybe they would like programs as sophisticated as Outlook?

Just because YOU like the design philosophy of Unix doesn't mean everyone that uses Linux must like (or adhere) to that philosophy.

If you don't like it, don't use it. But obviously there is a DESIRE for this type of program in the Linux world, or it wouldn't have been created.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Wdomburg]

>Heck, as far as a I know (And I could be really
>wrong here) it's not even like it loads modules
>or something like that. It's just one massive
>700,000 line program.

You're really wrong. Aside from being a mail and groupware client, Evolution has also been one of the primary testbeds for Bonobo.

The actual program itself is just a shell that loads components to do all the dirty work:

/usr/bin/evolution
/usr/bin/evolution-addressbook
/usr/bin/evolution-addressbook-clean
/usr/bin/evolution-addressbook-export
/usr/bin/evolution-addressbook-import
/usr/bin/evolution-alarm-notify
/usr/bin/evolution-calendar
/usr/bin/evolution-calendar-importer
/usr/bin/evolution-elm-importer
/usr/bin/evolution-executive-summary
/usr/bin/evolution-gnomecard-importer
/usr/bin/evolution-ldif-importer
/usr/bin/evolution-mail
/usr/bin/evolution-move-tasks
/usr/bin/evolution-netscape-importer
/usr/bin/evolution-pine-importer
/usr/bin/evolution-vcard-importer

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[cduffy]

Not really -- this would be true, but Evolution's design is tightly compartmentalized. Let me pose a question to you: If an application uses a system such as Bonobo rather than the traditional pipes and such to integrate separate components into a single unified whole, does this really make it any less integrated than those using the traditional (pipe-based) approach? Certainly, it makes for a more tightly integrated look-and-feel, which may lead to charges of bloatware by those not knowing that the object model is working under the covers; the actual design needs to be considered, though, before that charge can be said to have any substance.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Panaflex]

Apparently you've never read or even touched evolution.

Suppose Evolution split its calender and email (and whatever else it does) features into seperate smaller, efficient programs. Programs that "do one thing and do it well". Evolution Mail, Evolution Calendar, Evolution Addressbook, and so on could still totally interface with each other using, e.g., Unix pipes.

Evolution IS made up of many smaller programs that communicate through CORBA. I'm not sure how "splitable" they are, but from my work on the calendaring component, it's not impossible. (I've been working on Calendar printing).

Pan

Groupware?

[hey!]

Is this really groupware, or just a nice e-mail client?

Groupware should help people collaborate. For example, Lotus Notes has e-mail, calendar, sure, but it is primarily a general purpose platform for building applications that require managing documents as they move from person to person. E-mail is just another application built on the platform.

Calling exchange groupware is kind of an exaggeration, and the attempts to create exchange-like open source "groupware" I've seen have been pale imitations of a pale imitation.

Honestly, though, if this had just had a decent free shared group calendar it would be a big step forward.

Re:pop3 or imap

[MindStalker]

Ok, BIG difference. With Pop3 you simply download the email into a local folder. With IMAP the emails stay on the server and you are browsing folders remotly. A goot IMAP client with make local copies of the mail also, so that you don't have to redownload everytime you want to look at a piece of mail. Think Webmail, without the web :)

NFS locking fixed?

[jeff_bond]

I looked through the change log, and found no mention of the NFS locking bug that you get when your home directory is an NFS mount (which is of course, a common setup on a company network).

Does anyone know if this is fixed? It's such a basic problem that I can't believe it's been in there since version 0.8 or something. It wouldn't be so bad if evolution allowed you to specify where to put your mail store, but no, it doesn't.

I bet this single problem alone prevents very many people from using it.

Jeff

Re:Converting from Kmail?

[jacobito]

Why do people insist on posting bug reports to slashdot? If you want your issue to be addressed, there's a proper forum for that.

Re:pop3 or imap

[Jon Peterson]

pop3 is a _very_ simple protocol that allows mail to be read, retrieved, or deleted from a server by a client. It's a had a few features added in later days, and might support simple management like password changing, but that's about it.

The main weakness of pop3 is that it treats the server end as a dumb, unorganised list of messages, and expects all cleverness (mailboxes, sorting, filtering, etc) to be done client side. This means it is a pain to change clients, and nearly impossible to manage one mail account from two clients (e.g. one at home, one at work).

The main strength of pop3 is that it works.

IMAP is a protocol that allows a client to manipulate a server side data store. All the useful information (what messages are read, which folders they are in etc) is on the server, so if you change IMAP clients, all the data is just read of the server, and away you go.

However, AFAIK IMAP is a rather complex protocol. I have never come across a client that implements it very well, all of them struggle with large numbers of messages, handling of attachments and so on. In addition, it's still possible for a client to implement client-side only add-on features that are then incompatibile with other IMAP clients.

Outlook is the only client I've used that seems to handle server-centric email well, and it probably does with in proprietary extensions. Of course Outlook's handling of SMTP is rather dire, but hey.

Re:bloat

[jilles]

700.000 loc is what it takes to write such applications. People sometimes claim there are smaller alternatives but invariably those alternatives are less feature rich.

People have long blamed MS for delivering bloated systems. But it is quite ironic to see that as linux is maturing it is also gaining weight. The hardware requirements for running a full KDE or Gnome desktop are getting awfully close to the hardware requirements of an average MS windows machine. If you consider that MS managed to deliver windows 95 in 1995 on the hardware of that time (pentium/486, 8-16MB) you might actually come to the conclusion they did a better job than Gnome or KDE since in terms of features (not stability of course) it still compares rather well.

No doubt people will reply with references to all sorts of windowmanagers which run rather nice on slow machines claiming they do everything you need. However, they don't fully duplicate the feature set of windows 95 so see above.

Yes you can build & run GNOME under Windows.

[Sleepy]

Yes, you could build and run Evolution under Windows, but currently ONLY under Cygwin + an X11 server (this is still local on the Windows box). A Cygwin setup can be accomplished by a newbie. See links below for running GNOME under Cygwin on a Windows box.

Much of GNOME will not build natively, although the libraries themselves are designed to be portable, and GTK is working just fine as Win32 (see GIMP).

There are two kinds of Windows ports... X11 display based, and true "native" Win32. The former is easy to do; the latter is not yet possible (tho you can help!). It's likely that a "native GNOME for Windows" will be much easier, once GTK 2.0 is released.

Links regarding running GNOME or compiling under a local X11 display:
http://news.gnome.org/976323862/index_html
http://xfree86.cygwin.com/screenshots/
http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley/1596/en/c ygwin.html

From the GNOME FAQ, regarding native GNOME for M$ Windows:
http://canvas.gnome.org:65348/gnomefaq/html/x359.h tml

A lot of people want to port GNOME and GTK apps over to Windows. To conquer the enemy they say, you have to enter their territory, then sway them to your culture (OS). ;-)

32MB to install Evolution with debugging symbols

[luge]

Without symbols, I'm told the main binary package is around 6 or 7 MB. This is still bigger than sylpheed, sure, but it also does calendaring, tasks, and addresbook stuff. So... take your pic.

Not so quick...

[FallLine]

score 3 : ignorance
They should port it to mac to waste their time. No, but seriously, I am sure mac users would like having a nice email client, but not even someone with half the IQ of a dead squirel would believe that there is a 10X market for MACs over Linux, there isn't even 1/10 the market for MACs.

Check yourself son.

Prove it. Linux _might_ have a larger installed base, but even those statistics do not say that it is overtaking Macintosh as a desktop OS. In fact, there are many reasons to believe this is untrue.

1) Linux is, and has certainly, been focused as a server OS. Most of those official statistics may be pure server installations.

2) Even those that use Linux as a desktop may be using it for the novelty/coolness/geek factor, rather than for productivity.

3) Many of the statistics are based on numbers of downloads and other measures, hardly proof that it's really being used.

4) Linux lacks a lot of the quality software that users demand. Thus I find it hard to believe that most people can get away with, never mind prefer, using Linux in lieu of Windows or Macintosh.

5) If Linux's desktop marketshare is so small, why are so few commercial companies porting their desktop software to Linux?

6) There are actually official statistics from IDC and others that show Linux is still a notch or two below Macintosh as a "client" (read desktop) OS. [I don't think they tell the whole picture though...in regards to my other comments]

FYI, I'm a Linux/*Nix/Windows user, not Mac and I have more than half an IQ of a live squirel even. Imagine that!

Re:However...

[schon]

when will linux itself be come something that non-technical people can use

Last summer, my step-father, fed up with Windows, asked me what I use on my computers - I told him I use Linux (Slackware) and that I'd be happy to come over and install it, and show him how to use it. In August (without my knowledge), he went out and bought Mandrake 8. He wiped windows from the machine, and installed Mandrake.

He uses his computer every day to chat with friends, surf the web, do email, and maintain his journal. He's VERY non-technical, and had no problems using it at all.

When he used windows, I used to receive at least two "support calls" per month from him. When he installed Mandrake, I got a one call about the UI differences (icons in the "k" menu, instead of on the desktop), but since then, he's had no problems, and I have recieved no calls for support.

Judging from this, I'd say that Linux already is something that non-technical people can use - much more so than Windows.

Linux Software != Hard to install

[JCMay]

Ximian has an answer for that: Red Carpet (usually) works great. Lately they've had some signature deficiencies, and there have been some dependencies that got missed WRT GIMP modules last night.

Beyond that Linux has much more comprehensive on-line documentation than Windows, in my estimation.

Case in point: I bought a Mitsume IDE CD-RW drive for my wife's school. I couldn't make any of the Windows software recognize it as a writer. I swapped it out for an older Mitsumi drive in my Linux box, and it worked just fine! Go figure. (I took the older drive to school, and *it* worked!)

I think a previous poster was right: Windows is thought to be easy because it's ubiquitous. People mistake familiarity for ease. Bruce Tognazzini talks about this idea.

Re:bloat aka low level languages

[sabre]

Another way to look at it is that they are writing in a very low level language. That language, the wonderful and mysterious C, is well loved by the Gnome project. C is wonderful for low level small programs, but it tends to fall down a bit when scaling up to an application of this size.

One very important thing to remember about code size is that LOC is a very good indicator of # of bugs. Reducing the number of lines of code (obviously without reducing functionality) is a good way to reduce # of bugs, and also to make your hackers more productive.

There are many higher level languages available, in many different language families. Often high level languages get blasted for being in efficient... but this isn't neccesarily so. For example, with all of the "object" stuff implemented (the hard way) in C, you are paying exactly the same runtime overhead that C++ pays when it has an object. All you are gaining, is the joy of having to implement everything yourself and the possibility of your naming schemes getting out of whack.

I think it's great that Ximian is continuing to survive and is about to "unleash" their masterpiece onto the world. I just wonder how much faster it could have gotten here if they didn't use C.

I find it interesting that the open source community (for the most part), tends to stick with C as the language of choice. Lowest common denominator choices like this are usually not the best.

-Chris

Re:Good, but why in C?

[Junta]

First just a comment saying that C and OO approaches are not mutually exclusive. You can have an OO approach in C (as gtk does). It is ugly as hell, and really doesn't make things that much easier to maintain than traditional C code, but it is possible. Not really defending this, just saying OO can be implemented in practically any language, just some can do it better than others..

As to why it is still in C++, I'll guess to make it consistent with the rst of Gnome (obvious) Why was Gnome done in C? Probably partially out of language bigotry. But some somehwat more valid reasons:
1) Give programmers maximum choice. It is easier to call C libraries from C++ apps than vice-version. If it had been based in C++, the C wrappers would be needed for any functionality, while C++ can call native C code without problems (usually)
2) A belief that C++ cannot be as fast as C. There is a little bit of overhead in C++, somewhat blown out of proportion by anti-C++ people, and therefore people think C++ is inefficient. Not really enough of a performance problem to justify this, but it is an explanation.
3) To this day g++ has been wishy-washy with how C++ code should be compiled. With gcc-3, hopefully we are coming to the end of those days. libstdc++ has changed so many times in terms of ABI, that programs compiled for one distro have little hope of making it on another. For maximum binary and source portability, C code was, especially at the beginning of gnome, the only choice.

There may be others, but these occur to me right off..

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[Sloppy]

I just can't get over the interface. Yes, yes, I know, it's "intuitive" (read: familiar to people who've used Outlook), it's just doesn't match the way I work.

Then you are not the target audience for this. The whole point is that it's supposed to be Outlook-like. Not because Outlook is technically or ergonomically worth copying, but because Outlook is strategically worth copying. Read what Miguel writes -- he's not trying to make the ultimate email reader; he's trying to make an infiltration tool.

There's no point in Unix-heads running this program. It's mean to be run by ex-Dozers, so that they won't notice/complain that they've been switcheroo'd.

Keep using whatever email reader you've always used. You're not supposed to switch to this.

Re:pop3 or imap

[irix]

I have an IMAP email box at my current place of employment, and I had never used it before coming here.

If I can help it I will never go back to POP. I read the same email box using Outlook 2K on NT, pine on Solaris, Kmail and Evolution my Linux boxen at home, Netscape Messenger on my SGI and Pocket Outlook on my iPaq.

If more ISPs offered IMAP and people knew the advantages they wouldn't touch POP with a 100ft pole.