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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 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.
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.
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"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
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!
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.
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.
.VBS's toast the system when some sap forgot to disable them, or didn't realize upgrading Outlook with the default settings would put support for them back in.
I don't see what this has to do with Outlook.
I think the quote was misleading, or just assumed we'd assume. Windows/Outlook is inherently inferior because users have too many privileges on the system, which lets those
If I was to run Evolution on Windows I'd have exactly the same problem
There's no scripting support in evolution (at least, not yet). I don't know of any security problems with it. I'm sure someone could configure it to make Word the default editor, thus allowing that MS flaw of surpassing macro checks, but that's not "inherent". Outlook tries to do too much, which is a recipee for disaster. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Part of the reason you'd emulate what the majority of people are using is to make it easier for them to transition to your software. You can't expect the majority of home users to want to switch to OSS if they'd have to relearn what might have taken them a long time to learn previously (and no, anyone that's had to try to help home users learn software can attest that this isn't an exaggeration).
:)
Businesses are the same way. They've trained users on the software they need to do their jobs. While the total cost of OSS may be lower, we can't forget that switching to OSS would incur training costs more than likely. By making OSS emulate the competitor, you provide an extra enticement for switching.
Yeah, we might not like how some of the MS stuff looks, but the one good thing about most OSS software is that it's often times easy to customize the interface
Users on a subscription model don't have to worry about licensing issues in the same way that a dog chained to a post doesn't have to worry about trampeling its neighbors' lawns.
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