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Will Evolution Exchange Microsoft?
Anonymous Howard writes "Infoanarchy has a comprehensive review of Ximian Evolution. The reviewer claims that the Windows/Outlook combination is inherently inferior in terms of security, because users have too many privileges on the host system. Also, Evolution's indexing appears to be quite well scalable."
Evolution is coming along very well. It has some small annoying bugs (at least when running under FreeBSD), but all in all, I find it to be a better solution then Outlook and Co. It'f faster and sure as hell looks much better too.
Would You Trust a Source Named Anarchy?
Enough said.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Everyone should switch to AOL email.. I mean come on.. dont you read the news? The easiest just got easier!
Together with a fellow GNOME hacker, de Icaza was able to convince some venture capitalists (AKA "suckers")
They sure were.
Evolution is one of those pieces of OSS, that you can point at and say: "OSS can deliver, there, eat this". It belongs to the group of amazing projects like Apache, Samba and Mozilla if you ask me. Now if we had some great multimedia programs (MPlayer is getting close though).
Anyone who's been tracking Evolution development from the early days will be aware that it used to have preliminary NNTP (news/Usenet) support that was lobotomised for the 1.0 release. At present, this is the only major feature that's holding it back from competing with the likes of Outlook Express and Outlook. Sure, GNOME already has the Pan newsreader, but it's clearly designed for computer-literate people and doesn't really integrate with any email client.
So, what's holding back NNTP support? It can't be all that difficult to do, after all Evolution provides all the infrastructure for handling large lists of messages. Only when NNTP support arrives do I think Evolution will be-feature complete.
My office needs an Ms-outlook substitue, and fast, since the outlook server enjoys crashing. Do they have any plans to make a w32 port of Evolution client?
hemi
For the last couple of days I have been getting mail from hemos (I am in his address book) that indicates he has been victimized by the latest Outlook virus...which begs the question...why is Hemos running Windows and reading his mail in Outlook? Here is the latest junk I received from Hemos.....Yahoo indicates that the message is 201K big. He's not using Evolution why should we?
W32.Elkern is a dangerous virus that can infect on Win98/Me/2000/XP.
Mcafee give you the W32.Elkern removal tools
For more information,please visit http://www.Mcafee.com
I'm still working on a clever footer.
What this all boils down to is security vs. user-friendliness. What the reviewer basically says about security is that the older 9x windows versions are not secure -- which is true, and that the newer NT based versions are but the lazy users don't bother to configure their systems in a secure way. Then he chalks down a point for linux and goes on.
But this is not a inherent linux strenght or windows weakness; it's just user behaviour. It's comparable with doing regular backups and such. Basically, the reviewer is saying: "My installation of linux runs a cronjob which makes a tarball of my important files daily, and my installation of windows doesn't; hence linux is less prone to data loss"
It's just a differance in accent; windows puts more of an accent on user-friendliness and linux more on security.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Am I the only person that wonders why MS hasn't sued the crap out of Ximian yet? As far as look and feel goes, Ximian Evolution is as close to Outlook in terms of apperance as it could get. The only real differences in user experience exist in areas where functionality differs in such a way as to necessarily alter the UI.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Strange review. It starts off trying to win people over to the Unix world from MS by talking security, then launches into a tutorial of Evolution, and finally give the open source model a thumbs up. If there was a point in all of this, I must have missed it.
The reviewer claims that the Windows/Outlook combination is inherently inferior in terms of security, because users have too many privileges on the host system.
I don't see what this has to do with Outlook. If I was to run Evolution on Windows I'd have exactly the same problem. People don't need to run Windows with Administrative privileges but they just do. It's the same with Unix/Linux.
Dave
I can testify to that.. evolution handles my folders with 20000+ messages very gracefully indeed.
Beware of machines with 128Mb RAM though.
i've recently switched to using evolution under debian linux at work, and i've been extremely pleased ... corporate standard here is netscape messenger v4.x, and so i'd basically defaulted to that on my old sparc workstation ... when i finally got a new PC, it came preinstalled with win2k, and for a while i just didn't have the time to install a proper os on there... i didn't really look forward to using outlook (no matter how much i dislike messenger) so i just kept my mailstore in ns messenger ... when i finally got a chance to put linux on my desktop pc, i tried out kmail, which effortlessly imported all my nsmail messages ... at this time i also decided to switch to IMAP, though, and kmail's IMAP support is decidedly lacking (at least in 2.2) ... a coworker suggested i try out evolution, and it's been absolutely great ... had no problem interfacing with the IMAP and LDAP servers here, and the interface is just what i've been wanting in a mail client for a long time ... virtual folders are absolutely great, as they allow me to have everything all nice and sorted in a graphical interface (ie, evolution), whilst keeping things in just a straight list for console clients (ie, pine) for when i'm only able to SSH into the corporate network
... and besides, the logo has a monkey! how can you go wrong with a monkey?
so yeah, overall it totally rocks, and while there are a few bugs / annoyances in it, i've been very pleased overall
09
Perhaps this has been Ximian's strategy all along. It'd actually be really funny to have MS suffer from the same strategy it has applied to its previous competitors... Of course this depends on it gaining an appreciable market share...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
I finally can get all my stuff out of outlook, damn it!!! Life sucks when you use outlook and the only thing you get exported out of it is crippled data and e-mail. ugh!
Xine is pretty good too.
:-)
It has an excellent UI for playback control (the one for playlists and config isn't so hot though).
Both of them have the same problem with less-than-perfect VCD disks though. (Seg fault / crash) MPlayer handles it a lot better though. It plays one VCD that causes Xine to crash every minute or so. MPlayer only crashes every 15 minutes with that one.
I'm not sure that's what it should do though. Aren't all errors supposed to be handled gracefully?
Yet a much more important issue is the other direction - open and freely accessible groupware protocols implemented by a free-as-in-speech server solution, with Outlook connectivity provided by a Windoze plugin. For example, the Bill Workgroup Server takes this approach.
Microsoft Exchange is not the only major proprietary groupware solution - Lotus Notes is here to stay, to be even more proprietary - it's quite impossible to read or write Lotus NSF files with anything but Lotus software. Free groupware standards exist and should be used by anyone. The user should have free choice between PHPgroupware, Evolution, Outlook and Lotus Notes, similar to IMAP providing choice between lots of different email clients.
I sent myself a few thousand extra messages by accident last night. The acid test of every mail reader I've used has been exactly this scenario. Evolution opened my mailbox, showed me the messsages. I deleted them.
It all took less than 10 seconds, and most of that time was SSL/IMAP reads from my IMAP server. Best darn mail reader I've ever used.
If you haven't tried it try this out: bring it up, select a message in the subjuct summary window. Right-click and go to the "create a vfolder on this message" sub-menu. It just rocks. You can even have vfolders that encapsulate multiple real folders or EVEN ACCOUNTS.
Very sweet!
If you are an information-hungry power user, one of your most important tools is e-mail. You use e-mail for research to contact people who really know what they're talking about. You use it to subscribe to mailing lists, where you will often be able to get a regular flow of high-signal information from a certain field. You use it to stay in touch with your friends, who may frequently send you interesting or funny links and forwards. Given this importance of email, it is surprising how poorly most email clients handle the task of organizing large amounts of information, especially when compared to Ximian Evolution, a free, open-source (GPL) email client for Unix. Windows users may wish to continue reading to see what they are missing.
Right now, I have an Evolution window open with about 40,000 mails from the last 5 years. (It's amazing how much traffic some mailing lists generate.) These are all sorted nicely into folders. One of these folders contains 14,000 messages that I received from May 1998 to May 2000 using Netscape Messenger. Searching the full text of all these messages for a string, say, "Finnish", takes about 5 seconds. Doing the same with Netscape Messenger would probably take a minute or longer.
This example highlights some of the greatest features of Evolution. By indexing all incoming mail (explained below) it offers amazingly fast searches. These searches can be stored as so-called "virtual folders", which can then be browsed just like real folders. Evolution imports mail from many common clients and uses the Unix standard mailbox format itself, so that Evolution mail can easily be moved to other clients should the need arise. Evolution is multi-threaded, which means that in most cases, it doesn't matter if the client is doing something in the background (like reorganizing your mail to save harddisk space) -- you can keep using it normally.
Now that I've teased you by listing some of the cooler features, let's look at the application's background and purpose -- you can probably skip this part if you're familiar with the Linux/Unix world. In any case, you may have heard of KDE or GNOME. These are projects which aim to make Unix easier to use by providing a pretty, well-integrated and intuitive graphical user interface (and the underlying backend). This goal has not been fully met, especially as competitors like Microsoft and Apple are also constantly improving their desktops. Linux in particular struggles with problems of standardization: The installation procedure for applications and hardware drivers is often difficult, and getting fonts under Linux' X-Window-System to look right is a perpetual nightmare (by now, most Linux distributions offer good, but not quite satisfying defaults).
The GNOME project was initiated in 1997 by Mexico-born hacker Miguel de Icaza. It is somewhat competitive to the KDE project, for reasons that are now obsolete -- but this is a case where most people agree that the competition has its benefits, and interoperability between KDE and GNOME is usually not much of an issue. Together with a fellow GNOME hacker, de Icaza was able to convince some venture capitalists (AKA "suckers") that a potentially huge amount of money could be made by giving away powerful software for free. Sometimes you just got to love capitalism!
This is, of course, a slight exaggeration -- in the past years Ximian developed several credible business models that are at least far better than most of the cat litter ecommerce projects that were fed with billions of dollars. After all, de Icaza's company, Ximian, is still around and the cat litter sellers are not.
Ximian employs lots of highly skilled hackers and artists. They sell (and offer for free download) a variant of the GNOME desktop that is more streamlined and more beautiful (I haven't tested it, but I prefer KDE anyway). They also offer Red Carpet, a small and useful application that makes it easier to install software under Linux -- with Red Carpet, you just select the package and wait a few second until the installation finishes. Any dependencies on other software or libraries are resolved automatically and the respective missing pieces are fetched as well. The whole thing is free, but you get faster access to their servers as a subscriber.
Red Carpet offers Linux users a convenience that most Linux distributions do not have. Only Gentoo and Debian (and those based on either of them) make the installation of applications equally simple. Since I use Debian, Red Carpet is of no interest to me: Debian comes with its own software installation system called "apt" which does pretty much the same thing as Red Carpet, without any fees and with very high speed, although it's a bit harder to get working.
As a company that aims for Linux on the desktop (and the corporate desktop in particular, as that's where the money is), Ximian quickly realized that one of the main reasons corporations are so slow to adopt Linux are missing equivalents to their productivity apps. This includes Office, but with the Sun-sponsored OpenOffice.org suite, a replacement is well on its way. However, one of the most important apps in corporations is Outlook.
The Magic-8-Ball says: Outlook not so good
Hardly any company with more than 10 employees can exist without some kind of internal messaging system, usually in the form of an Intranet. Such Intranets often run with a combination of Microsoft Exchange as a messaging server and Microsoft Outlook as the client. But Outlook can do more than just mail, in combination with Exchange, users can schedule meetings or share calendars, and read their messages directly on the server so that they can easily access it from all workstations. While not all companies use these features, it's obvious that they are valuable in many contexts.
Outlook has the speed and usability one would expect from a Microsoft product. It has become the subject of international media reports for another reason, though: Frequent security holes in combination with weaknesses in the underlying operating system have made Outlook the cause of the most annoying email worms in history.
One problem with Windows is that versions of the OS still based on the ancient DOS had no real access control model. Concepts like file ownership and processes running as different users were not to be found in the "little brother" of the more professional Windows NT/2K operating systems. Fortunately, with Windows XP, the product lines have been united. Still, for various reasons, most home users will continue to run their sytems as superusers. That means that any virus or worm has read and write access to all the user's files.
Let me contrast that with my current setup. I am right now logged in as user "moeller". I have write access only to my personal desktop and application configuration as well as the projects I'm currently working on. I can start most applications, but I cannot delete any of them. Once I have finished working on a project I move it away to another directory where I only have read access as a normal user. As a result, a Windows-style virus or worm could do little harm on my system. It would also have a hard time installing itself without getting noticed by me.
Aside from that, Linux offers another protection against viruses and worms: diversity. While I may run an Debian/KDE/evolution combination on a patched 2.4.18 kernel, someone else might run SuSE/GNOME/mutt with a SuSE-specific 2.4.10 kernel. On Windows, you have millions of users with a system that is essentially still DOS and Outlook Express as an email client.
And then there's active content. Microsoft's strategy to kill browser rival Netscape involved the use of technology that would only run on Microsoft systems, such as "ActiveX controls" which are basically just Windows executables embedded in a webpage. There's also the powerful but dangerous VB Scripting language. In addition to that, they have embedded their web browser, Internet Explorer, into nearly all of their applications (to display help files, mail etc.). This was necessary to make their case that IE cannot be removed from Windows without causing irreparable damage. Outlook therefore uses IE to display HTML mail. That means that whenever there's a problem with Internet Explorer, the same problem can be exploited to develop email worms. Since users only rarely update or patch their systems, bugs can often be exploited for months.
This combination of Microsoft monoculture with active content and an insufficient underlying security system has proven to be nothing less than disastrous. Some worms have spread because users have executed attachments (another Windows-specific problem: executables are often not recognizable as such -- on Unix, they all have the "executable" flag). Others are automatically run by Outlook because of flaws in Internet Explorer or the active content interpreters. Some worms are happy to just replicate, others mail around users' files (not without infecting them first, of course) or send messages in other people's name (cf. this Wired article).
Even in a corporate environment, systems are frequently unpatched and users have too many rights on their systems or the network. But the nastiest part is that, since email is a very open system, these worms get sent everywhere, even to Unix users. If you have your email address on a few well-indexed webpages, you can hardly protect yourself from an influx of messages caused by the latest worm. Of course, Unix users have the best tools for email filtering available, but it's still a pest. Now you know why many Linux users are proselytizing zealots -- they are acting in their own best interest!
Unix mail has many advantages to Windows mail -- after all, email was invented on Unix systems and is part of the system architecture. Any Unix system has a mail spool that can be used to queue messages for local delivery. That means that the system itself can send messages to you. For example, you might get an email that the installation of some program has failed for certain reasons. Unix comes with sendmail or equivalents, which means that you can easily setup your own mail server. If you have a static IP address, you can then get your mail delivered directly to you without any delays. Unix has a standardized mailbox format which is understood by most Unix mail clients -- fetching mail with one client and reading it with another is completely viable. And so on, and so forth.
The Messaging Mystery
Given all this, why do corporations not switch to Unix-based messaging solutions? One valid reason in the past has been that traditional Unix mail clients do not care much about usability. Most of them are console-based, all with their own keyboard syntax and menu layout. Also, few if any of the old clients have collaboration features like Outlook -- they are email clients and nothing else. But let's not fool ourselves into believing that such business decisions are purely rational. Managers make these decisions based on buzzwords and screenshots, even if none of the nifty features is ever used. And then there's the simple platform dominance of Windows: It is required for too many applications to just switch.
With more and more productivity apps coming to Linux, this is about to change. And Evolution should give pointy-haired bosses more buzzwords than they can shake an MS-Word attachment at. Ximian spent years working on Evolution to fill this application void in the Unix world. Licensed under the GPL, its source code is freely available for anyone to modify. Besides being a graphical email client, it is also a calendar, contact manager, task-planner and news tracker. And if you're willing to pay, you can use Exchange's collaboration features.
I cannot comment on the installation procedure on some *cough* inferior *cough* Linux distributions, since all I had to do to install evolution was typing "apt-get install evolution" in a console window. It can be installed through Red Carpet, though. I am not aware of a Windows port of Evolution, but this is certainly not impossible -- many other complex Unix applications have been ported to Windows; there's even a project to port the whole KDE desktop.
When you start Evolution, you are presented with an Outlook style multi-panel window, with a big button bar on the left side. Let's look at the features in detail.
The Summary
The first page you see is the "Summary" page, shown in the screenshot below. This page contains weather information for locations you can specify, the latest headlines from news sites you can select (anything that supports the RDF Site Summary format, i.e. almost every major site), information about your folders, tasks and schedule. This is a pretty neat idea. To render the page (and other HTML pages), the GtkHTML control is used. I mention this only to clarify that it is not Mozilla's Gecko engine -- so if a security flaw in Mozilla is found, you don't have to worry about your Evolution security (as opposed to the IE/Outlook connection).
Evolution summary view. This view shows headlines from a few sites, including infoAnarchy, and my current To-Do-List (can you figure out what I'm working on?).
The summary comes in very handy, especially since it's so customizable. I'm a bit surprised that they don't put a little donation box for Evolution development there, with feedback on the amount of donations they have received that month. In any case, when you hear Microsoft talking about "Web Services", don't forget that a lot of it is hype: What you see in the Evolution summary is nothing less than "customizable web service delivery", or something.
Messaging
Evolution lets you fetch mail from a POP3 server, but you can also use a traditional Unix tool like fetchmail to get it, or access it on an IMAP server. Sending mail is similarly easy, you can use an SMTP host or your local sendmail server. You can import mail in a few formats, including Outlook and Unix' mbox-format. I previously used Pegasus Mail for Windows, which is a bit exotic so it's not supported, but with a little tweaking I got it to work (see my HOWTO) and, as mentioned above, have managed to import my entire remaining email backlog (a feat I have not accomplished with any email client for Windows).
Once you have your mail set up, you will want to organize your folders. The interface for doing so is a bit cumbersome, but since you will not use it too often, this doesn't matter much. At this point, we need to take a look at the difference between vFolders and real folders. Real folders are files on your local harddisk that store messages. vFolders are small files that store searches, but in the program, they act just like folders. When creating a vFolder, you specify certain search criteria and the folder(s) to which they are to be applied (these can also be vFolders). That's it: When you click the vFolder, the actions are performed and the messages viewed.
When should you use vFolders and when folders? That is a matter of taste. In my opinion, vFolders should be used only for searching, and folders for organizing. If you want to read certain mail exclusively in a certain folder, use a normal folder. If you just want to temporarily switch your view, use a vFolder. For automatically copying or moving mail to folders, filters are used. These are applied to all incoming mail matching the set criteria. Besides copying and moving stuff around, you can also delete the mail, change its color, status, or score. (The score is used for ranking the mail in the list.)
Nicely enough, Evolution offers some presets for quickly generating filters from the subject, sender or recipient field or from a mailing list. This makes organizing your mailing list filters quick and easy as it should be. The same presets are available for vFolders.
Theory of Evolution
How is the ultra-fast searching and filtering that is necessary for features like vFolders to work accomplished? Quite simply, Evolution uses the same method any database (for example, Google's) uses to make searching stuff faster. Instead of wading through the file by brute force, the positions of words within the mailbox files are indexed: a separate file contains pointers into the mailbox file, so that when you search a specific phrase, the search is sped up by orders of magnitude. The index is automatically kept up-to-date as new mail comes in. This sounds simple, but the underlying mathematics can get tricky, so Ximian's hackers have done a great job.
It is unfortunate that this kind of indexing is not more wide-spread. It would be nice to have it implemented on the filesystem-level, with specific support for certain filetypes (like XML). This would mean that whenever you create a file, the appropriate index would be updated. As a consequence, you could search all the files on your harddisk for a certain string within a few seconds. Sadly, while a few commercial solutions that produce similar results exist (DTSearch, Altavista Personal Search etc.), these are not very popular (and not free). On Unix, the locate-database at least contains an index of all filenames, so that you can search for filenames matching certain criteria quickly, and there are a few open source search engines like htdig. It is rumored that the next Windows version will contain advanced indexed search functionality.
The implementation in Evolution is stable and fast and shows the benefits of indexing clearly, without many disadvantages (the indexes themselves use a few megabytes of space, but not much to worry about). Take care, though: If you want to access your email with another client, your index will get messed up if the client changes the file -- the index will then point to the wrong positions in the file and therefore be no longer valid. Make sure to parse the file as read-only, or import a copy. If something goes wrong, you can delete the index files, and they will be regenerated.
As you delete mail in your folders, it is crossed out and needs to be cleaned before it is really removed. This has the advantage that mail can still be undeleted for some time.
Reading and writing mail
With alternating background colors, the message list is well-readable. It has the expected columns, but in the default view doesn't show the message size. Hint: Right-click the column titles to add or remove a column. Thanks to the index, you can very quickly sort the list by all criteria. A semi-complex search mask can be found directly above the message list, making quick filtering amazingly simple. All status indicators are obvious and well designed. Mails can be temporarily marked as "important" with a single click and sorted so that these come first, then newest. This is my preferred message view. It's a really good way to remember replying to certain mail and, in my opinion, beats complex filtering rules for color highlighting or scoring.
A typical folder view with a search filter applied. Even with thousands of mails, these filters can be applied within a few seconds.
Evolution uses a mail preview panel similar to Outlook. While I never got used to mail preview elsewhere, Evolution's implementation is acceptable. After a definable period of viewing a mail, its status is changed to "read". But you can also view the mail in a separate window instead. Mails can be moved around with drag and drop. GtkHTML renders most spam (HTML) mails you will receive correctly. Attachments are handled nicely, although the user interface looks a bit strange. Images are displayed inline. The reader is still feature-poor; for example, in V1.03, it has no "Select All" function. These features and menus are being added for V1.2, though, or already in CVS.
The composer has everything you would expect, including HTML (which should not be used in mail to preserve interoperability) and spellchecking support for various languages (needs to be enabled). However, for large mails, you will want to use a powerful text editor instead.
Encryption
Email worms faking senders have made it obvious that encryption and digital signatures are essential to email safety. Any modern email client should make encryption available with a few keypresses. Fortunately, Evolution has the necessary functionality. There is a free PGP-compatible encryption tool called gpg, and while you might expect such a thing to be difficult to use, it's a lot easier than the good old PGP command-line client, and several graphical front-ends exist. What is more, you don't need to do much with the command-line client anyway -- you just create a keypair, tell Evolution the ID of your key and it does the rest: signing, encryption, key import, signature verification etc. - it's all there just waiting to be used. Encrypting and decrypting is very fast and works almost transparently. Except for neat features like key lookup and gpg's initial configuration, gpg integration into Evolution is perfect.
IMAP and Exchange
Evolution natively supports reading mail on an IMAP server by subscribing to specific folders. Since I do not have an IMAP server, I cannot tell you if or how well that works and how it affects the local indexing. On March 25 Ximian released a product with which Evolution can read mail directly on a Microsoft Exchange server as well. That product is called Ximian Connector and is traditional closed-source software; it costs $69 for a single-seat license. Besides mail, it also supports Exchange's collaboration features, more on those below.
Summary of mail component
Nomen est omen: Email with Evolution is definitely a step forward. The user interface offers the comfort of the best clients from the Windows world, while the indexing and virtual folders are Unix-typical high-productivity ideas. What tabbed browsing is to Mozilla, the indexing is to Evolution -- once you have discovered its value, you will never want to live without it. Searching that lost password, digging out the years-old recipe from grandma or just quickly changing the sorting order are all so fast that you don't have to think about whether you want to go to the effort of doing it or not -- you just do it.
Task Planner
The task list is a simple table where you can very quickly add and remove tasks as you complete them, but also add advanced information (completion data, priority, amount of work already complete etc.) if necessary. If you define a completion date, the color of the task will change as the date comes nearer. As you check a task to be complete, it is crossed out -- you can configure the planner to automatically hide these tasks after a certain period of time.
This is all nice and pretty much what you expect from a task planner, although it does not include any collaborative features. Personally, I'd like to be able to give scores to tasks and gain points (and possibly RPG-like levels) by completing them, as a motivation trainer, but this is probably a too wild idea to be tested here first. Collaborative task completion would be interesting, though: Putting tasks on a server and letting users decide which ones they want to finish.
Calendar
The calendar is far more complex than the task list. Like most organizers, it allows you to display different time scales and to add a new appointment by double-clicking a calendar cell. Appointments have a daytime property or can be all day long, they can be public or private and assigned to one or several categories. Of course Evolution also has a built-in reminder, which is nicely implemented since it can do several things at different times: Show a message 30 minutes before the event, play a sound 10 minutes before it and give the user an electric shock if he's still there when it happens.
But Evolution not only allows you to plan your personal appointments but to also schedule appointments together with others. The so-called iCalendar standard makes it possible to schedule appointments without a need for a central server -- you just need someone who organizes the event. iCalendar files are simple email attachments that are sent to all people involved in the event. You can configure the event so that the attendance of some people is required and the attendance of others is optional. Once your selection is complete, the invitation is sent to the selected people, and they just have to say whether they want to accept the meeting or not -- this reply is then sent to the event organizer.
You can schedule an appointment with other users by sending them a suggestion in the form of iCalendar files.
In order to effectively find the right date and time, participants can mark some timeblocks in their calendar as "free time" and then exchange their calendar files before scheduling. This is a bit tedious, and that's where the proprietary Ximian Connector comes in again -- it uses the central Exchange server for the entire scheduling process.
The scheduling interface could be a bit more streamlined, but it is only valuable where the people you are dealing with have the software capability to handle the iCalendar attachments. In a corporate environment, the clients can be standardized -- outside it's a bit harder.
Contacts
The contact manager is quite sophisticated feature-wise, but I found it a bit buggy -- I had big problems with the search functionality. Other than that, it worked fine. It allows you to create cards with many information fields and even lets you link a contact to other contacts, but it also makes it easy to just manage email addresses. Cards can be forwarded as vCard-files, which is another of those helpful business standards. As you would expect, you can also create contact lists which you can use to quickly distribute mail to several recipients. The drag & drop interface used to add contacts to a list is not optimal, though, as it requires the window to be always-on-top.
Conclusion
Using Evolution is a pleasant experience. Almost everything works as it should and most functionality is quite intuitive. Where it isn't, the helpfile is usually quite informative (unlike, unfortunately, the helpfiles of most open source applications). For a recent version 1.0, Evolution is remarkably stable. The general performance (aside from searches) is not what Unix users get from console clients, but is better than all Windows clients I know. The localization and internationalization are a bit shaky at times: Some translations are incorrect, and some foreign character encodings in the subject line are not properly interpreted.
The very best part is that Evolution is completely free to use and will never die, even if Ximian should go down the tubes. That's the best argument a startup can have against a large corporation like Microsoft, proving Ximian's open source decision right. At the same time, a proprietary connector application to Exchange seems like a good business model, since it harms neither consumers nor corporations -- even for small companies, the price is a bargain, whereas private users don't care about Exchange access. It would be nice to see an open source equivalent of Exchange, so that companies can switch entirely to free software. But no plans for such a server seem to be in the works.
I'm surprised that Ximian doesn't try to get normal users to support development -- given the quality of the product, I believe the willingness to pay for specific feature additions would be definitely there, and the donation interface could be easily integrated.
Evolution is clearly a product to keep an eye on, and for those who are still stuck on Windows, it's an excellent reason to switch. In fact, I would go so far to say that Ximian has done such a good job that they could even make Evolution-using monkeys out of creationists.
I've been using Evolution 1.03 built from sources using Gentoo and I have been extremely happy with it. Evolution will even underline your spelling errors which my Outlook98 would not do. I imported six years worth of email which was an 800MB Outlook PST file and have some folders with over 6,000 messages. The filter functions are very powerful and I'm able to filter out spam very easily. There still is the odd bug that I encounter but none have been show stoppers that prevent its use. I'm sure those will be fixed soon. Evolution was the program that allowed me to use Linux as my primary computer. I only boot Windows to run my tax program and accounting programs now. I might try Plex86 to see if I can run my Windows legacy applications within Linux. Goodbye Outlook. /g
I to have made the switch from Win2K/Outlook to RHLinux/Evolution at work. We dont use Exchange and the one thing I cannot seem to find is an importer that will handle those pesky PST files. So all my old contacts and mail are still stuck in Outlook. Grrrr.
T
"Corporate rock still sucks. What are you gonna do about it?"
Google Groups
:) I love Evolution but think Gnome stinks.
Ok, ok, I know reading them from a browser isn't as nice as reading them in a good client software, but if that was the only thing holding me back from Evolution, I would make the switch. Then again, I newsgroup infrequently.
I'm waiting for Evolution on KDE
And, of course, cost aside, this also implies that a shop with microsoft-free aspirations currently has to buckle under and purchase at least one Windows server/exchange combo, plus hire or contract the skill to administer the beast. This is exactly what happened to my small company recently. We were going to go Linux (and in fact our Web site and time tracking server were Linux-based), but being a "virtual" company, with everyone working out of our homes, we required strong group collaboration. So, reluctantly, in came the W2K Server box running nothing but Exchange. If only there were a Linux-based option (even if it weren't OSS!). And yes, we looked at Notes, but I don't even want to go there... Of course there used to be OpenMail by HP (I think) but that's been sold off, is unavailable, and we can only wait and see where that goes (and, regardless, it won't be OSS).
Now that a polished, capable client exists, it would be fantastic to complete the offering with a server.
Please Rate my comment (and help support Fre
Evolution is one of the few things out there that could draw attention of the corporate eyes to using Linux as a desktop. The features that it has are really nice and comprable to those found in Outlook.
What will make it even better is the ability to import my mail from Outlook Express and handle about 10000 emails in a folder.
When it supports shared calenders then it will be great. Want to know why that feature is important? Well simply because the office manager can enter everyone's schedule into it and then everyone else can look at it to see where they're supposed to be, or if someone is gonna be going on vacation.
But all in all, it's a great program and I reall hope it keeps on improving. Now if only they got on of the MTA's to mimic the functionality of Exchange, as one easy to use package, then THAT would be awesome! I'd be able to convince my company to switch in no time.
Watch a bunch of half-truths and misrepresentations of facts. He starts out comparing search to Netscape without actually testing it (quote:"Netscape Messenger would probably [emphasis mine] take a minute or longer." Then he talks about Windows 9x security. What does that have to do with a mail client. How many large companies out there actually use 98 and not 2000 anyway.
And he talks almost entirely about these so-called miraculous new features (mail sorting, etc.) with almost no mention as to downsides. It is such a disgusting piece of non-reporting/advertising that it disgusts me to look at it.
A semi-interesting article written by yet another Debian bigot. Apt-get already has a successor, my friend.
Windows is for kids!
--"The reviewer claims that the Windows/Outlook combination is inherently inferior in terms of security, because users have too many privileges on the host system."--
I think the reveiwer is a little bit unobservant. If the typical windows wanted security, they wouldn't be using windows at all. I think in most cases the word 'insecure' goes hand in hand with one of two things: uninformed, or knowingly ignorant. I would fall into the knowingly ignorant category. I am forced to use a M$ windows workstation, and Outleak at work, but know its dangers so use *nix at home.
Sorry, just having a bad morning... no offense intended.
"...I'll need guns" --Chow Yun-Fat in 'Replacement Killers'
"Am I the only person that wonders why MS hasn't sued the crap out of Ximian yet?"
Sort of. I don't know why MS hasn't sued them, but I'm more curious as to why Miguel/Ximian insists on copying *everything* MS does. I have a strong dislike of Outlook's UI, and so there's no chance I'm going to use Evolution - it looks exactly the same as it's non-free competitor. Yiick!
Gnumeric of course was the first such example. Use a windows-like GTK theme and you'll have trouble telling the difference between it and Excel. Doesn't Gnumeric also use a VB-like scripting language? I know the function library is very similar.
Then there's the whole Mono/.NET thing. C#, the intermediate format, the runtime - it's all a Java clone, but dancing to MS's tune rather than Sun's. Given how the majority of the Free Software / OSS community has shun Java, why are these guys jumping on what is essentially the same bandwagon, albeit one that's shiny new and pink, rather than a more mature one?
ObJavaFreeSoftwareDisclosure: I *am* a free software Java developer, so I guess I am biased here.. but honestly, what gives?
Anyone taking bets on Ximian's next product? An IE clone based on Gecko? A shoddy OS based on Linux? Sendmail with GUI just like Exchange's?
Mike.
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
Someone has been drinking the GPL bong water again.
Get a grip people. This so called 'product' has precisely two hopes of displacing outlook/exchange, zero and none.
Outlook (Not OE) for all its faults, works and works well for its intended purpose.
Until X11 is shitcanned and there is a single 100% consistent interface for ALL GUI applications on Linux, its going nowhere on the desktop @ those end users where it matters.
Take a look at the recent offerings from cupertino w.r.t some ideas on how to do this properly.
Wild assertions inspired from bogarding the RMS crack pipe aint gonna change this.
Curmudgeon
What about the reality of users who are stuck with microsoft because its what they understand here. Evolution as a product is cute, but the REAL evolution shows us that VHS can win too. Just because its a better product, DOES NOT mean it will gain market share. I would LOVE these tools, but I can't take the time out of my overworked, underpaid life to change my entire PC IT platform for the sake of a hobby. HOW does open source intend to get this into the mainstream?
I hope ximai..xiami...oh whatever patents vfolders.....
Would You Trust a Source Named Anarchy?
.gov.
More than I would trust one ending with
At least the word anarchy (probably) makes you pay attention to what they are saying and force you to evaluate the information critically.
If it passes this evaluation it is, IMHO, more worth than any information you just swallow down because some source with "authority" tells you.
This is one of the good things about slashdot too. Half of what is posted here is rubbish, there are true gems here too. But you have to use your intellect to find them.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
Evolution may be wonderful, but other wonderful things were supposed to change Microsoft, e.g., the web and Java, that were duds.
Microsoft thwarts [Ee]volution by changing the environment to suit itself. Only a dinosaur-killer will put evolution back on track.
[this
I use to use Balsa which was a fine email client for standard email but I have moved over to evolution for one reason, the integration of contact information and palm support in the Ximian version.
_ __
I like being able to sync up with my palm and have all my contact info reflected in my email client. The task and calendar functions work very well too. My company uses Notes but supports pop3 so I am set. Ximian I hope is working on a Notes connector. That would be the best.
Evolution is a very slick app. My only criticism is the adherence to UI standards based off the bloated slow Outlook model and the fact there is no easy way to insert and html document even while sending html based emails. This sounds like a silly thing but our timesheets are online and if I want to give my consulting company my status it is much easier to insert the html into an email than to send an attachment.
_______________________________________________
ACK
Had it's quirks for awhile but it's a solid piece of software. I've not paid much attention to it's email functions as I've used it primarily for newsreading. I fail to see why email functions would even be considered a valid critique for a newsreader.
Uh... hello? hello?
-Dave
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Evolution is great, but is there an OSS substitute for M$ Eschange server I am looking for something wich has a common calender.
First, a user doesn't REQUIRE full access to a Windows system. Just like UNIX, I can log in as root if I want, but it's not always a good idea. Set your users up to be just users and they'll have a harder time killing the system. Outlook 2000 is always more secure in regards to viruses. It won't let you run many attachments directly, and it will prompt you before letting something access your address book.
Second, Evolution costs more than Outlook in an Exchange environment. When you buy an Exchange client license you get with it an Outlook license. If I were to use Evolution I'd still have to purchase the Exchange client license PLUS the Evolution connector for Exchange. So, it's not always cheaper.
Finally, I consider Exchange to be Microsoft's best product. The server is very robust and extremely reliable. A good Exchange admin can set up Exchange and only needs to do minor maintenance and it'll run itself. Notice I said a GOOD admin...not just someone off the street. My Exchange servers run until something else, such as a hardware repair or firmware update, requires me to restart the system. The only software restarts I have to do usually are the fault of anti-virus software getting hung. Now that we've switched to Antigen those have gone away as well.
I use Outlook at work... because I have to. Ok, so I could get a job at a place that doesn't use Windows, but I'm trying to get the ignorant to open their eyes and migrate. I'll save that story for another time...
But I've been using Outlook at work for years, including all of its "advanced" features like custom forms. I've been using Evolution at home for maybe 6 months. I deal with up to 100 emails a day at work and I have to say Outlook's scalability absolutely sucks. To keep it running at any reasonable speed, I let it "auto-archive". When my local mail box was about 85mb, the client was just too slow. Searches could take 3 or 4 minutes (on a fast machine). And the custom forms are horrible. I'll never use them again. We also tried importing a few thousand contacts through Outlook (to Exchange), but beyond maybe 100 for a single Outlook user, it grinds to a screeching hault.
It may sound silly, but my favorite feature of Evolution that's not in Outlook (97 at least) is the discussion threaded e-mail view. On a mailing list, for example, I can see a tree of the conversation and read it in conversation order rather than date. It's such a little thing, but that's really handy. With that, it's nice, easy configuration, it's speed, and all the other great features others are posting about, overall I prefer Evolution.
One other thing about it that relates to every Windows and KDE/GNOME app: Linux desktops are multi-threaded properly so windows will never freeze with an app and the desktop won't freeze unless the destop app itself has a problem. If Outlook freezes, well I've got to see that frozen windows until if and when I can "end task" and all of the other apps run slowly around it, when the desktop doesn't feel like freezing also. When connected to a big e-mail server, proper multi-threading is a great feature for the client to have.
Developers: We can use your help.
Console-based and keyboard-based apps can have excellent usability, as applications like Emacs show. What they don't have is "usability for beginners"--it takes a while to get proficient at them. But once people are proficient at them, they can be more efficient with them than in GUI-based systems.
It is true that this may limit their adoption in corporations, but it is absolutely not true that therefore we all should settle on user interfaces that make making easy things easy to learn their number one priority.
Also, few if any of the old clients have collaboration features like Outlook -- they are email clients and nothing else.
Gee, this is no coincidence. In the UNIX world, collaboration and group applications happen in the file system. This is doubtlessly confusing for people who are used to Windows, but it has worked very well for the last 30 years on UNIX systems. Windows/Evolution-style systems don't look like an improvement over that.
Don't get me wrong: Evolution is a nifty E-mail client, and it will doubtlessly attract many users, in particular users coming from Windows. However, neither Windows nor Evolution are the single gold standard for usability--there is not single gold standard for usability. There are many different kinds of user interfaces and many different kinds of people. Let's not fall into the Windows/Gates trap of believing that one size fits all.
Nonetheless, if one was an SA or esp in management (of an SA group), I would think that finding an e-mail client that offered similar functionality, better security and ease-of-use as compared to Outlook would be welcomed. Particularly when these "idiot" e-mail viruses continue to be a problem. They waste the time of the SA group (cleaning up the mess) and kill productivity for the poor saps that are "victims" by opening these viruses. Finally, due to the similarity between Evolution and Outlook, a memo describing the new e-mail client and that it works like Outlook would likely suffice for transition.
The fact that it DOESN'T run on Windows is an issue that will hopefully be resovled, although doesn't affect me, I admit...
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
Evolution is a good start in its category. But let's not overpromise.
Can it synchronize with PDA:s?
The remember the time when ximian said "yea, we are going to do ms.net on linux !" and everybody says "whaou, MS on linux, great!" even the GPL-gurus converted their mind ...
;-)
Nearly a year later, the mono project is still a partial, bad-quality, stalled implementation of the CLR (the very core of the ms.net stuff)...
I am just laughing !
Why on earth did you think MS would do anything for non-MS platform ?
We all know that what MS want is kill Tux and kill Java as well ! What they whant is $$$ !
Any MS holded or related firm when they promise you the graal
4R34".
... what about the hordes of people who use Windows? And want to continue doing so?
I'm desperately looking for a new email client. I'm still using Eudora Lite 3.16 at home, simply because I haven't found anything to replace it with. The newer versions of Eudora are laden with spyware and ads. I looked at Pegasus and disliked it. Outlook and Outlook Express have nice ease of use, but we all know the utter lack of built-in security (this is Win98SE btw).
Yeah, I'm probably going to nuke one of my boxes and put Linux back on it soon, but I'll still have a Windows box around for playing games, and it's likely to be my main PC while Linux is my putter/hack TiVo box.
So, any suggestions on a decent Windows email client? I was really hoping Ximian was cross-compiled, but it doesn't appear so.
Microsoft no longer develops the Exchange client for Windows. When you buy Exchange Server you get two CDs in the box. You get the Server CD and the Outlook CD. You no longer get the old Exchange Client. Read the license, you can now use Outlook.
We host customers' intranets and email and we need a server replacement for customers that insist on having us host Exchange for the benefit of their Exchange clients. That is, I want to do just the reverse: keep the Exchange clients and replace the server for internal deployments. Oh magic 8-ball what sez you???
If you really want to compare apples to apples you have to consider the cost of a Linux distribution, assuming you want support...which most companies do. If I buy a PC from Compaq with Linux on it they are usually the same price as with Windows. That was always the case with Dell as well.
Of course, you could buy a bare PC with no support, but that depends on your situation. It's worth a little per machine to me so that Compaq can't say it's a software problem. They support the entire system when it goes wrong.
I bet a large sum of money that he is being paid an even larger sum of money by MS to tie "the Free software community" into as much Microsoft technology as possible.
Then, when the going gets tough for MS, in one fell swoop a gaggle of lawyers will surround every Open Source project that has been tainted with the MS brush, and sue its developers into oblivion. Or, perhaps, even use the excuse that the GPL prevents identification of an individual owner to lobby to declare the GPL itself illegal.
Let us not forget the many other advantages of tying into MS technologies for MS in the meanwhile, like .NET: "I like what I see on Unix, but for the full deal, I have to switch to Windows servers", which will (as history shows) turn in to, "I like what I see on Unix, but I see only the Windows version is being enhanced any more."
I would not mind paying for it, but I want to compile a native FreeBSD binary -- they chose not to offer FreeBSD support...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
uninformed, or knowingly ignorant
As opposed to ignorantly ignorant?
Suck figs.
...is its lovely behavior of permanently saving every email as a file in your directory, even if you're using something like an IMAP server where the whole point is *not* to save messages locally. This leads to two problems:
1. My quota gets eaten twice. I lose the mail quota for having mail stored on the server, plus I lose disk quota for the local copies.
2. The directory is created with your default permissions, which for most shared systems include readability by others in the organization. I have been able to wander through other Evolution users' home directories and read their email. Joe User is not going to have a *clue* that this could be happening.
OK, sure, local caching is good, but use some compression or encryption or *something*. (And yes, I still use it, because it's the nicest client out there. But security is not *that* hard.)
He speaks "All your base are belong to us"-speak!
Only because it would get us a big step closer to freedom from Microsoft. Most of my coworkers don't see Microsoft as putting chains on us while we're so dependant on them, but I certainly do. I've come to the point where I'm happy to see any little step away from Microsoft as a good thing for us, even if we lose some features.
Developers: We can use your help.
I'm feeling aggressive today so i'll comment that this review is typical Linux cool d00d crap. Every third sentence was bragging about how nifty he is because he's using Debian, that he runs KDE, etc.
You don't see someone reviewing a car and saying, "Well, I opened the door, and got in. It was a nice car, though I drive a different model. The windows opened and closed pretty fast, but my car has a car alarm that opens the windows for me, so WTF? Anyway, I pulled out of the driveway, and I noticed that it turned differently than my car.", etc, etc.
BTW: I run Debian/Enlightenment/Evolution.
Does that make me your fucking hero? Christ.
I just loaded and am trying out, but some features I'd like to see:
- Palm Pilot support. Gotta get that calendar & todo list on my PP.
- Ability to check multiple email accounts and quickly be able to change hats so I can send email back out as "support@", or "sales@" without a whole lota hassle.
- News server support. Knode is fine... but would be nice to have one interface.
>>...Outlook (97 at least)...
You're comparing a new version of Evolution to a 5+ year old version of Outlook? Doesn't sound fair to me.
Incidentally, scream at your company, if they are going to use Outlook, to upgrade to a more current version. Microsoft stopped making security and other patches for Outlook 97 a while ago. It's people like you that keep KLEZ writers in business.
I'm a fan of evolution, but it still can't sych mail messages with my palm (it will for calender, contacts, and such). I'm just hoping this feature will be integrated in the future.
Oh yeah, is there any easy way to transfer outlook messages to Evolution (I've only used some dumb roundabout ways)
www.prochange.org
We have already coded an initial version of virus and spam filtering, along with integration to the open source Apache James mail server. The project is in need of more developers, so be sure to take a look at the website!
When Hemos ask the question "Will Evolution change Microsoft?" I feel obligated to say that evolution has theorically changed pond scum into human beings, but the downside is that it took millions on years.
By far the best email client under Windows is The Bat!. I've been using it for over a year and it's excellent, both in terms of its ease of use and its security. I've won it a few new converts too. Newbies like the fact they can attach files by dragging files from an Explorer window directly onto the text of their message. I like it because it has many privacy things built in such as placeholders for images when viewing HTML to stop spam merchants detecting who views their emails by embedding invisible external images.
It's also feature rich. View multiple accounts, threaded conversations, etc. The software is solid as a rock and regularly updated. It costs $35 but you get a month free trial. One thing I appreciated is when I went over the 1 month it didn't lock me out from my email, it just encouraged me to pay. All in all one happy chap.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
We buy the academic open license MS Office suite for $60.00/seat. This includes Outlook as well as the whole office suite.
Now how am I supposed to tell my boss that Linux/Evolution/Open Office, will free us from the licensing costs and license tracking overhead of closed proprietary software? The OS academic open license for Windows XP costs $40.00/seat and the Office suite costs $60.00/seat...for a total of $100.00 per seat.
The exchange connector for Evolution costs $69.00! This doesn't give me an entire office suite....just an Exchange connector! And I still have the license tracking overhead of closed proprietary software.
I'd be willing to consider this product as an Outlook replacement, but not at this cost.
-ted
I mostly use windows with outlook. I am pretty fed up with outlook (slow, unstable, insecure, vendor lock in and hard to export mail/addresses without losing information) and would like an alternative. I've been looking for a serious alternative for a while. I specifically dislike Netscape (too slow, insists on running in the same process as my browser), Eudora (too ugly/old) and Pegasus (too ugly/old)and consider them to be inferior options and haven't seen any other comparable mail clients (in fact I consider outlook express to be better than any of these). There are plenty of other mail clients but they all lack features.
Specifically I want HTML in my mail but no scripting (unlike the popular beliefs here, outlook can provide this functionality). This disqualifies any command-line clients. I want flexible filtering. I receive a lot of mail and filtering is essential to me. Outlook is pretty good in this area too. I don't use/care about calendering right now but may need it in the future. It needs to be fast. Outlook does not scale well. Searches take forever in my mailbox and sometimes it just sits there for minutes doing god knows what for no obvious reason leaving me waiting to read/send some mail.
Evolution looks like it has most of the features I need and I would consider using it instead of Outlook. I like the concept of a virtual folder and would probably use such a feature to organize my mail (1 virtual folder for each of my colleagues, 1 folder per topic I'm working on, 1 with everything in it, etc.). Because it is open source I have some level of confidence it performs well and is secure. If only it had a win32 version.
I think being crossplatform would convince a lot of organizations of standardizing on evolution. Reality dictates that most companies need to use ms office and depend on calendering. However, a lot of people are very annoyed by the continueing stream of outlook related security breaches. Most large companies have lost valuable time fixing such issues in the past few years. I'm an advanced user and know how to dodge security issues in outlook but it still is annoying.
If evolution is anywhere near as good as it is claimed to be, a lot of people would switch if it was available on their platform of choice. I certainly would give it some serious consideration.
Jilles
MS already ported .NET to FreeBSD :)
While I admit that Exchange is the biggest piece of junk, many big businesses use it and I have had to administer several servers running it in the past.
So far from Evolution I have seen it looks and gets the basic functionality of Outlook, but falls short of being a Outlook replacement.
There are no permissions, offline folders, group collaboration on Linux side, importing Outlook PST's, and biggest of all Exchange replacement.
It still relies on Exchange to work as a collaboration package. So one still needs to run the dreaded and buggy Exchange server with connector. True that you cant catch the nasty worms and viruses on a Linux box but it still can be exploited with an Exchange server.
I'm sure it's possible to get it working, by reading some how-to's and following the instructions, but I never could. (under RedHat 7.2).
Compare this to the Windows version, where most folks can achieve sync with Palm Desktop simply by plugging in the device and running setup.exe.
Evolution seems to assume that you are already syncing the Palm with another Linux tool, when in fact, lots of folks might be starting from scratch. I'd like to see this improved to the point where they have a setup widget for Palm devices that starts from nothing, loads appropriate drivers, and then allows you to sync all your data with Evolution with no fuss.
You can chalk this up to not being nerdy enough, but really, I don't think you should have to be a sysadmin to setup a Palm.
Are there *any* GUI mail clients with *good* gpg integration?
I'm pretty happy with mutt and don't intend to change, but there are a *lot* of people out there that use GUI clients, and having both evolution and kmail users unable to do simple stuff like GUI generation of keys and *especially automatic key lookups* is pretty non-optimal for many users.
May we never see th
When will the linux community resist the stupid notion that a server doesn't need database and implement some sort of information store based on database backend for a server? any leads? thanks
I've used evolution till version 1.0.2 then I discovered Sylpheed.
Its look is more essential but it does more things than evolution, does them better and is really fast (one of the reasons for which I left evolution).
Evolution is part of the bag-of-tricks we use to maintain our little Linux user's group in an all-MS shop. It does most everything Outlook does, without all the nasty crashing and security bugs. And it costs our shareholders NOTHING.
VMware or VNC to a Windows box for the proprietary apps we can't do without; Evolution as our mail app/PIM (syncs well with our PDAs); Opera to browse our corporate sites (it lies about being IE: very nice); Mozilla for everything else. Some of us use WM, others KDE or Ximian Gnome. Life is good.We're getting by.
Hooray for Evolution.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
People have a natural aversion to things that are different.
If your goal is acceptance, you want to avoid being different.
"Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated"
Who's the reviewer targeting here? At first glance it appears to be windows users who he wants to tell about the merits of Evolution and Linux en passant. But then he starts dropping names like CVS and fetchmail, apparently expecting his audience to know about them or at least be able to pick up their function from context. I.e. he can't be targeting Windows users.
So that suggests he's targeting people who are using Linux already. But then, if this is just an Evolution review for Linux users, why throw in the Outlook comparison and Windows snides? And why no mention of popular Linux MUAs like Mutt.
I'm left confused.
If there is hope, it lies in the trolls.
Hi, I think that user friendlyness is M$'s goal - but obscure help systems and paranoic anti-competition devices are what have being weakening the justified money that people keeps on paying for that software.
Those great developers are getting less and less creative at every new release because of those reasons. And they are not able to deal with the new improvements in a user friendly way. It all seems to have become another 'Powertoy' (that means that is not completely implemented yet). Of course, that even when you are not getting paid for some new security or sofisticated software added at a program, you are selling it and creating a new tendency at the market.
That is one of the effects of Linux creations, creating new consumers tendencies!
Rwe obliged 2 save our future by choosing:O3 hole-greenhouse effect instead of accepting everydays gossip-nonsense chat?
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gb/
Gnumeric does plan to support Visual Basic scripts using Gnome Basic
http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/972544387/inde
I wish slashdot would automatically convert these into clickable hyperlinks, im too lazy to make them clickable
Many OS X users (like me) have been frustrated with MS's lack of a true Exchange client. The current client they have in Office X is Entourage, doesn't support any Outlook functionality. After reading the glowing review of Evolution and doing a little Google searching, it seems there may be an OS X port of Evolution soon!
- hackers/2002-April/004332.html
According to the Evolution hacker list, there is a port underway, though no posts have been made in the last month.
http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/evolution
It would be sweet irony if OS X users got 1) an email client for OS X that could deal with Exchange but not from MS, that 2) was better than Outlook itself.
One thing I'm not clear on is Evolution's functionality. Can it handle all of Exchange's functions like being able to schedule meeting rooms and other resources, tasks, etc? If so, I could see a large number of users in my company dump their OS 9/Windows boxes and pick up new Macs running OS X...
And while we're at it, let's go ahead and copy the blue screens of death, crashes, and security holes since windows users are so used to those and we're trying to give them an environment as familiar as possible.
There are two different standards for linux software: a standard for technical/kernel stuff, and a standard for interface design. The double standard for linux development: Microsoft's bad technical designs are eschewed, while their horrendous UI designs are embraced. This is largely due to the fact that the linux development community has enough technical saavy to avoid repeating microsoft's dumb technical decisions, but they are so incredibly ignorant of UI design theory that they cheat off the most popular kid in class, who also happens to be the stupidest kid in class(which you can see for yourself at the Interface Hall of Shame)
It would not surpise me if in the next year we'll start to see linux interfaces with window-in-window MDI, multi-row tabs, and talking paperclips.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Two ways have been mentioned so far.
.pst folders to mbox folders, then import the mbox folders into Evolution.
The client only method is to use Mozilla to convert your
If you have access to an imap server, then transfer your outlook folders to the imap server, then pull them down in evolution.
There may be other methods, but these are the two I am aware of.
-Rusty
You never know...
Where are the sound mixing programs? Nothing compares to CoolEdit.
:-)
As one of its authors, I'm quite biased, but I think Audacity is in some ways even better than Cool Edit. Audacity is very user friendly, cross platform (Windows, Linux, Mac), and supports unlimited tracks. At least check it out.
Other sound programs are very powerful but less user friendly. snd is the perfect example of this.
Also, a powerful Digital Audio Workstation program called Ardour has been in the works for a while, and it is in the same ballpark as ProTools.
Here are some of the things that we have that work, and work well. So far, we have:
kdevelop - development environment
KDE3 - desktop environment
Evolution - mail, PIM, colaboration (albeit, you need the Connector to use Exchange Server)
Mozilla/Konqueror - pick one. Browser, o'course. And there are others that are 'satisfactory' for most tasks as well.
Xine/mplayer/xmms - media
PDF viewer - many are available that work well.
samba client component - combined w/ all the various file managers for X, it's equally as functional as the Windows clients.
These items are getting there, but still need a lot of/some help:
GIMP - 'replace' photoshop. Still needs a lot of work on making it easier to use for 'non-script writing' users. Several generations behind Photoshop in that respect, but quite/just as powerful for a technically advanced artist.
OpenOffice - I'd say it's arrived for most things, if it were able to deal with Word documents and had revision history support. There are just too many documents out there that are in Word format that will still need to be read and written to. Those features need to be supported.
gnumeric - as far as I know, it should be able to do anything someone needs to do, but I've never really used Excel or gnumeric, besides for some very basic work. It did what I needed it to.
There might be some commericial solutions to these things (WineX, for instance), but the idea is to not have to rely on MS's horrid licensing extortion, etc.
Here are the main applications that I feel are the main things that are keeping linux back on the desktop in companies:
AutoCAD - there really aren't any OSS CAD solutions, let alone one that's comparable to AutoCAD. IMO, the best thing AutoDesk could do would be to release a version of their software for linux. The (possible) added development that would be necessary to port it would be beneficial to the overall stability of their product as well. I really don't see there being an OSS solution for AutoCAD in the near future, unless it's an abstration layer. CAD is such a complex, involved item and would require a high degree of backward compatability.
Complete independence from any Microsoft product - Unless this happens, MS will still have a strong foothold on manipulating the industry, and will make things general hell for everyone else involved as long as possible.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I will definitely look into this. I like the idea of running an Exchange client on my Linux machines.
So when do you guys develop an Exchange server replacement that runs on linux? I'd like to import my mail from Exchange and have all my Outlook clients, Ximian clients, and web access.
That's where the $$$$ are.
-ted
Anarchy all the way, baby.
I kind of assume everyone has, but you don't mention it. Excellent mail client included.
pretty secure, does imap all that, does ldap address books, blah.
J
Here is somebody who is telling you how they can slowly move an office over. OO is taking the desktop slowly from MS. A nice Mailer/calendar costing less than MS and running in the Linux/Unix arena will make many more possible. Once ppl are use to these, it is much easier to move away from MS.