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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."
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.
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.
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
I hope ximai..xiami...oh whatever patents vfolders.....