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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."
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
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!
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.
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"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?"
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.
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.
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
While Evolution is broken for inline pgp, I have to ask - did you submit bug reports? :-)
Most of the in-line pgp bug reports didn't start flowing in until after the 1.0 release which by that point was too late to fix for the most part because it to fix it right, we have to redesign the way we handle it completely.
btw, I as well as the mutt maintainer and every other mail client author that implements in-line pgp will agree that in-line pgp is just plain broken to begin with.
if you read the bug report that you linked to, you'll notice that there are a lot of possible security holes that all clients must face when implementing in-line pgp.
I would highly suggest you convince your friends to use PGP/MIME. There is some slight brokeness in Evolution's PGP/MIME implementation too (it sometimes says a signature isn't valid when it is, but it will never ever say a signature is valid when it isn't) but this is being fixed in the development branch. If you have questions about why this didn't work, feel free to email me or the evolution mailing lists and I will explain it in as much detail as you want.